The Sacrament of the Altar

A Book on the Lutheran Doctrine of the Lord's Supper

Preface to the English Edition

I wish to express my gratitude to the Reverend Dr. Robert D. Preus, president
of Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana, who has made it possible
for this book to reach its readers. I also thank Mr. Edward L. Rye, Stockholm,
who made the first translation of the manuscript, the final version of which I
myself have gone through.

The Rev. Professor Dr. Hermann Sasse, North Adelaide, South Australia, had
helped me from the very beginning of my career as a scholar. He rejoiced at the
news of a future English edition of my book, but he did not live to see it. To
the memory of my beloved Hermann Sasse I dedicate this book.

Tom G. Hardt

No part of this document is to be further published or disseminated by any
means without the express permission of Erling T. Teigen, 314 Pearl St., Mankato
MN 56001 (e-mail: 74022.2447@Compuserve.com
).

The Christian doctrine of the Lord's Supper is sometimes treated on the basis
of ideas derived from the field of the psychology of religion. The doctrines of
the various denominations are, in such cases, categorized in such a way that
belief in the Sacrament as the body and blood of Christ is considered
characteristic of what is termed the Catholic type of religion, which seeks
support for its belief in the tradition of the church, in the darkness of
cathedrals, and in its devotion to the host. The teaching that the Sacrament is
a symbol, mere bread and wine, is deemed to be part of the Protestant type of
religion, with its belief in Scripture alone, a puritanical absence of
tradition, and concentration on personal religion. It is probably correct to
assume that, even within the bounds of conservative Lutheranism today, many an
adherent of the doctrine of the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ in
the Sacrament looks more or less in that way at the foundation of his faith. He
finds it absurd to think that Scripture alone is the basis of belief in the Real
Presence. People like this want safer ground under their feet: Mother Church,
which has always taught the Real Presence. An affirmation of the Real Presence
founded on traditionalism should be confronted with a reminder that this is
dogmatically a very vulnerable position. During the Reformation, Luther's friend
and helper, Philip Melanchthon, was brought to waver in his faith about the Holy
Presence, when he studied the opponents' lists of quotations from the fathers of
the church and saw how confusing the testimony of the ancient church on the
Sacrament could sometimes be.

At the famous disputation between Luther and his Reformed antagonist, Ulrich
Zwingli, at Marburg in 1529, this appeal to the ancient church was made in a
modest way when Zwingli pointed out that a certain latitude of views existed
among the church fathers, and that that state of affairs could make it possible
for Luther and Zwingli to commune at the same altar. In a touching appeal,
Zwingli asks Luther for the hand of fellowship across the different
interpretations of Jesus' words at the first celebration of the Lord's supper.
That hand is turned away by Luther, who, through references to the possibly
divergent opinions of tradition, was never brought to hesitate, unlike
Melanchthon, concerning the Real Presence and its exclusive claims to be true.
What matters to Luther also here is what Scripture, the Bible alone, testifies.
In his lectures on the Psalms held in 1532, Luther states that we stick to
Christ's words about the Sacrament without questioning them, preferring them to
any and all human views and evaluations, even those of the ancient church.1
This does not mean that the sometimes careless way the Reformed used quotations
from the fathers was indulgently allowed to pass. In other contexts, Luther, on
exactly this point, could prove that the Reformed misunderstood the texts of the
fathers.2 But what is important is the fact
that Luther, in principle, did not accept dependence on anything but Scripture.

Luther dealt frequently with the problem which confronts us here. False
institutionalism at the expense of the truth, a characteristic of the church of
councils and decretals, had resulted in neglect of the purpose of the exegesis
of Scripture with its necessarily exclusive alternatives of true or false. Such
exegesis had been replaced with a vague faith operating within patristic
quotations of desirable elasticity. The Evil Power infused into Christendom the
notion that not everything had been revealed to the apostles, that Scripture was
insufficient as the only rule of faith, since, after all, its content was
subject to dispute. Thus the church was referred to the fathers. But such faith
becomes a loose faith with a vague profile, marked by the will to stick together
within indefinite boundary lines, rather than by the Biblical passion for truth,
which is a battle fought for God himself. This is what happened to the Father's
plans: since they wanted to have Scripture without fights and struggles, they
became the cause of leaving Scripture entirely and ending up in purely human
speculations. Then all disunity and all dispute about Scripture ceased indeed,
but that was a divine struggling, God fighting with the Devil, as St. Paul says
in Ephesians 6:12: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
principalities, against powers, against rulers of the darkness of this
world."3 What happened at that time is
going to happen again after Luther's death: the apocalyptic finale which Luther
describes prophetically, turns out to be an institutionalizing which forms a
parallel to that of the papacy. Desperatio veritatis will reign, he says,
a despair about the truth which makes us get tired of Scripture and of trusting
it,4 while the eagerness to observe human
statutes will be all the greater. These factors alone will be what holds
together that church which is without faith and without Scripture.

In the controversies about the Sacrament, Luther finds among his adversaries
just such a general vagueness; he does not find primarily a doctrine which runs
contrary to his own. Their unwillingness to debate on the basis of Scripture
leads to their being satisfied with making faces and using arguments such as
"This is unspiritual." In the controversy itself, his enemies reveal
an incomprehensible softness, a timidity that does not come from God: They
operate with a weak, timid conscience.5
These critical words which Luther voiced well suit the peculiar laxity which we
can see in Zwingli, despite his indisputable eloquence. In one of his books,
Zwingli admits that he had not carefully read Luther's latest book. Nonetheless,
he undertakes its refutation. A friend of his had informed him of the contents
of Luthers book while they were going for a walk. This conversation had to serve
as compensation for the deficiencies in Zwingli's study of Luther.6
The reason for this dogmatical disinterest is, as Luther accurately observes,
the fact that his adversaries operate on the basis of two general principles
given by natural religions. These principles make any and all discussions about
individual Bible verses superfluous. These two principles, which raise the
Christian from the myopia of Bible study, are the following: first, the Real
Presence is not of any use, viz.; it cannot be proved that the Real Presence is
a necessary part of the doctrine of justification; secondly, the Real Presence
is unworthy of God, for God neither can nor should be locked up in a little
piece of bread and, even less, be given to the godless or even fall on the
floor.7

Luther very carefully analyzed these two cardinal errors of his opponent,
especially the first. This means that in the battle for the Lord's Supper which
Luther carried on through the entire course of his theological career, he
explicitly condemned and anathematized the basic theory of modern Luther
research and of the modern Luther renaissance. This basic theory is often worded
in roughly the following way: Never think that you have grasped one of Luther's
teachings until you have reached the point where you can trace it back to the
forgiveness of sins. Often with the unmistakable tones of pulpit oratory, the
doctrine of the Real Presence is, in such cases, traced back to the
psychological necessity of a concrete meeting with God in order to uphold
fellowship with Christ. On all levels of modern theology, we run up against this
attitude to Luther's material. In the reader or hearer the impression is
necessarily created that either Luther was guilty of a grossly, monotonous
schematic-thinking in dealing with the words of Scripture or that the modern
research scholar reveals such a defect in dealing with Luther. Concerning this
systematic motivation for the articles of faith, and for the doctrine of the
Real Presence in particular, Luther himself says: If they [his opponents] had
tolerable insights into the faith, and had at any time felt a spark of faith,
they would know that the highest and the sole virtue of faith is that faith does
not seek to know why that which is believed in is of use or why it is necessary.
For faith does not wish to set up borders for God or call upon Him to render
account as to why, for what purpose, and for what necessary reason He commands a
thing. Faith would rather be foolish, give God the honor and believe His mere
word.8 The question itself is the work of
the Devil: In like manner our mother Eve also had God's word for it that she was
not to eat of one particular tree. Then the enthusiast's false god came to her
and said: Why did God give such a command as that, as if he meant: What is the
use of this? Why should this be necessary?9

At Marburg Castle this decisive difference with regard to Christian
revelation became manifest during the talks between Zwingli and Luther. In his
first speech against Luther, Zwingli says: And finally you yourself concede that
the spiritual eating [in accordance with John 6] gives consolation. And since we
are in agreement on this major point, I ask you for the sake of the love of
Christ not to accuse anyone of heresy on account of this difference [about the
Sacrament]. The fathers did not condemn one another rashly, even if they were
not in agreement.10 In Zwingli's view
this major point, faith's eating, about which the parties agree, makes bodily
eating unnecessary: When we now have the spiritual eating, what is the use of
bodily eating?11 Again and again,
Luther's opponents emphasize the fact that the Real Presence lacks systematic
support in the doctrine of justification. However, Luther makes no attempt to
produce any such pious explanation. Instead he summarizes his views in one
monumental sentence which is so important, that it can be said to surpass his
triumphant words, "This is my body," which Luther had written on the
table with chalk. This sentence of Luther's, which makes it possible to believe
in the words This is my body, reads: Every article of faith is in itself its
own principle and requires no proof by means of another one.12

Luther gives us an extensive explanation of this sentence. Your argument is
built up like this: Because we have a spiritual eating [by faith], bodily eating
[of the body of Christ in the Sacrament] is not needed. I answer: we do not by
any means deny the spiritual eating; indeed we teach and believe all over that
this is necessary, but that does not prove that the bodily eating is not
necessary or superfluous. I do not search for an answer to the question if it is
necessary or not. That is not our business. It is written: "Take, eat, this
is my body" and thus one absolutely must so do and believe. One must, one
must . . . . If He commanded me to eat mud, I would do so. I would do so because
I know more than well it is for my benefit. The servant should not quibble about
his Lord's will. One must close one's eyes. The benefit Luther confesses he
believes in is here, in principle, none other than the benefit which consists of
obedience to the will of God, which we can never penetrate. That will can never
be made the object of scrutiny according to some pattern. Oekolampadius,
Zwingli's co-worker answered Luther and said "Where is it written, Herr
Doktor, that we are to go through Scripture with our eyes closed?" In
saying these words, what he attacks is not a paradoxical Biblicism which
persists in maintaining untenable positions for the sake of offence. He attacks
scientific exegesis which definitely refuses to force upon the Bible
justification by faith as a systematic, straight-jacket principle governing
interpretation and which instead has no other aim but to let the material speak:
I abide with my text.13

The words must be heard in their naked form, Luther says repeatedly after the
Marburg talks: "And even if it were such an insignificant sacrament that it
gave me no benefit and was unnecessary so that neither grace nor help were given
in it, [even if] it were merely God's command and law requiring us to use it, by
virtue of this divine power which we are bound to subject ourselves to and obey,
this would, on account of this covenant, compel and invite us not to despise it
or deem it a superfluous or a lowly thing, but rather to use it diligently with
earnest and in faithful obedience and to honor it highly, since nothing can be
greater or more wonderful than what God bids and commands by His Word."14

The concentration on obedience to God without would-be-pious looks to the
left and right for personal consolation and needs for salvation does not, of
course, mean that Luther in any sense wanted to deny that the Sacrament gives
grace. We shall deal with that in another chapter. But the conviction that the
Sacrament is a means of grace does not have its place in the interpretation of
Jesus' words about bread and wine. What is decisively characteristic of Luther
and of all truly Christian theology is the fact that the doctrine can be put
forth in the form of a loci i.e. arranged in such a way that each doctrine in
principle is prescribed by itself, independent of other doctrines. Luther's
pronounced admiration for Melanchthon's Loci15
shows that he considered this system exemplary. The reason why Luther did not
publish a similar little book for young people was merely because he lacked
pedagogical skill, as he himself says. The contempt which many modern
theologians, and especially modern Luther scholars, show towards the loci
method is based on the notion that justification by faith is the threshing floor
of faith, and on the conception of Luther's religion as one single eruptive
outbreak of one single experience of a psychological nature, which has to be
found in everything Luther ever said.

In this context it can also be said that Luther's view that the articles of
faith are not interdependent, is also reflected in his conviction that
soul-murdering heresy can never be defined as limited to the rejection of the
central articles on salvation. Stubborn rejection of the miracle of the
Sacrament leads to damnation when correct instruction has been given. He that
makes God into a liar in one of His Words and blasphemes or says that it is
unimportant if He is blasphemed and made out to be a liar, blasphemes God in His
entirety and considers all blasphemy a trifling thing.16
"They are bound over to punishment and 'sin unto death' as St. John says.
About their leaders I speak; the poor people subjected to them may our good Lord
Jesus help out of the hands of these murderers of souls. They, I say, have
received frequent exhortation."17
"They console themselves, I am told, with the fact that they write a lot of
books and that they are very busy in the church and with Scripture. To what
avail? They adulterate the Word of God and His Sacrament and they do not want to
listen. But he that does not hear God will in turn not be heard by Him; 'his
prayer shall be abomination,' Prov. 28:[9]."18
That is why Luther, as a servant of Christ, pronounces condemnation over those
who have condemned themselves. This condemnation does not take a detour via a
conclusion that denial of the Real Presence would logically lead to other, even
worse heresies. Such demonic logic does indeed exist, and Luther points this
out. But this is not what gives such great weight to Luther's powerful anathema
against Zwingli and those who consciously dishonor the Sacrament. "And even
if they boast that they believe in this article about the person of Christ and
talk about it a lot, don't believe that. They lie in everything they say about
this. With their mouths they do indeed say so (just as the demons in the Gospel
call the Lord the Son of God) but 'their hearts are from me,' Matt. 15:8. That
is certain. Just as the Jews swore by the living God, but their talk was false,
the prophet says.... For it is certain that he does not rightly believe in an
article of faith (after having been exhorted and instructed), he does not
believe in any one article with the right earnest and faith."19
Here we see the background for the solemn damnamus, we condemn, contained
in the Lutheran Confessions in their doctrinal articles following the usage of
the synodical decrees of the ancient church. Here the confessions, like Luther,
distinguish between seducers and the seduced: "However, it is not our
purpose and intention to mean thereby those persons who err ingenuously and who
do not blaspheme the truth of the divine Word, and far less do we mean entire
churches inside or outside the Holy Empire of the German Nation. On the
contrary, we mean specifically to condemn only false and seductive doctrines and
their stiff-necked proponents and blasphemers."20
"The ban is thus directed not against the many pious, innocent people
...[who] go their way in the simplicity of their hearts, do not understand the
issues and take no pleasure in blasphemies against the Holy Supper as it is
celebrated in our churches according to Christ's institution and as we
concordantly teach about it on the basis of the words of His testament. It is
furthermore to be hoped that when they are rightly instructed in this doctrine,
they will, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, turn to the infallible truth
of the divine Word and unite with us and our churches and schools."21
Nevertheless, despite all this tender feeling towards the simple people who,
during Holy Week 1525 had to say good-bye to Jesus Christ in the Holy Sacrament
of the cloister church of Zurich22 the
whole sharpness of real Biblical curse remains against those who knew their
Lord's will and did not act according to it.

For Luther, that explicit will of God is to be found clearly and
unambiguously in Jesus' declaration at the first celebration that the bread and
wine in this meal are the body and blood of Jesus. Also the heathen of ancient
days as well as the Jews, who for centuries have accompanied Christianity with
constant criticism against, among other things, the Sacrament, have all, through
their accusations of cannibalism, confirmed this circumstance common both to
faith and to unbelief, to wit, that the Christians' Sacred Meal takes place by
virtue of words which declare that bread and wine are Jesus body and blood.23
A Jew or Turk who denies the truth of revelation must nonetheless find that
Christian faith is just precisely the Real Presence.24
The fact that Luther was involved in polemics about the Sacrament should not be
allowed to obscure the fact that Luther always considered the doctrine of the
Real presence easy.

In this respect, Luther gets unexpected support from his opponents who
concede that the factual wording of the words of institution would seem to teach
the Real Presence. This is, they think, the low and carnal meaning, which he who
is spiritual elevates to the spiritual level required by generally valid,
systematic norms. It is here that the many well-known symbolic interpretations,
which often contradict one another, come in. For Luther, however, this flight
away from the obvious and self-evident remains an unnatural thing, and it is for
him unnatural that his opponents thus admit that they have corroboration for
their views, not in the text, but somewhere else.25
Perhaps Luther's strongest argument against a symbolic interpretation of the
Sacrament is the one in which he wonders how the Reformed think Christ should
have expressed Himself to teach the Real Presence, if that was what he wanted to
do. By virtue of the principles established by the opponents, they can turn
every expression into symbolism. This excludes the Real presence a priori
so completely, that even the linguistic means of expressing even a hypothetical
Real Presence have been blown to pieces.26

This allegorizing by principle has, Luther says, also other, equally
catastrophic effects, e.g., the transformation of the account of creation to a
symbolic understanding. Christianity could thus be compelled to adapt itself to
heathen philosophy and natural science, teaching like Aristotle and Pliny that
the world is eternal and that there never was any such thing as the first human
being named Adam.27 This would seem to be
the inevitable result of a spiritual interpretation of the words of institution.

Luther asks his opponents just where the allegorical nature of the words of
institution is supposed to have been proclaimed. Of course, Luther knows of a
vast number of parables in Scripture. But in all of these it is clearly said
that they are parables, either in such a way that it is directly stated that a
parable is to follow, or by clarification through other passages of Scripture.
For instance, it is made clear that Christ is not a botanical vine, but the
God-Man who is thus to be considered a spiritual vine: "I am the true
vine" (John 15:1).28 In connection
with the institution of the Sacrament, there is no proclamation given to the
effect that the Supper is a parable. Since Scripture contains no further
interpretation of the Sacrament, the words of institution stand alone without
intermediaries. For this reason they must be taken literally. Of course, this
does presuppose that Scripture as such is intended to be understood and that the
person speaking is not some whimsical person whose words and actions are
incoherent, some kind of person who, without premeditation just throws out
statements with a veiled meaning. A sterling summary of that attitude is found
in the Lutheran Confessions which dwell on the circumstance that Jesus in this
sad, last hour of his life...selected his words with great deliberation and care
in ordaining and instituting this most venerable sacrament. These words are
Jesus last words, His will and testament, filled with consideration and the
desire for clarity. This is a Sacrament which was to be observed with great
reverence and obedience until the end of the world Jesus knows that the eyes of
all the faithful, until the end of the world, are directed at His lips that
night.29 That is why Jesus spoke so
unambiguously. He is the unambiguous God who already in the days of the Old
Testament was a God of clarity. There is, of course, no more faithful or
trustworthy interpreter of the words of Jesus Christ than the Lord Christ
himself, who best understands his words and heart and intention and is best
qualified, from the standpoint of wisdom and intelligence, to explain them. In
the institution of his last will and testament and of his abiding covenant and
union, he uses no flowery language but the most appropriate, simple,
indubitable, and clear words, just as he does in all articles of faith and in
the institution of other covenant-signs and signs of grace or sacraments, such
as circumcision, the many kinds of sacrifice in the Old Testament, and Holy
Baptism.30 The ministers of the new
testament standing before the altar are guided by directives that are no less
clear and unambiguous than those given to Aaron before the mercy seat. In both
testaments, God's servants are to take God at His words.

With the above we have stated the most essential things about Luther's
interpretation of the words of institution. A closer study of his refutation of
the Reformed symbolism leads to the polemics he was forced to engage in. His
arguments there are an overabundance, not prerequisites for achieving certainty
as to the real meaning of the words of institution. It is not necessary to know
all about those controversies in order to have met what convinced Luther of the
gift of the Sacrament of the Altar. Provided that this is kept in our thoughts,
a few of the arguments Luther used in this context will be taken up here. For
instance, Luther points out that if the symbolic interpretation, according to
which the bread is not Christ's body, was correct, Jesus words, "This is my
body," would be a sentence without any meaning at all. The words,
"Take, eat, do this in remembrance of me," would give the entire
content of the whole Sacrament.31
Furthermore, Luther wonders what sense the sentence, to the effect that the
bread signifies the body, is supposed to have. What he demands is not the demand
of systematic theology for a Real Presence. He demands that Jesus' words must be
sensible, must make sense. Why would the Church until the end of the world have
to be informed of such a flat allegory?32
Where, by the way, does the resemblance and similarity between bread and the
body of Christ lie? The Passover had an evident resemblance to Christ being
slaughtered for the salvation of many. What reason would there be to replace
this splendid sacrament of symbolism with the plain and incomprehensible bread
symbol?33 The similarity cannot be found
in the very action of the Sacrament (the breaking), because the explanatory
words refer to the elements present, not to an act.34
Above all, Scripture says that the body of Christ was not broken. The chalice,
the content of which was not poured out in parallel with the breaking of the
bread, has even less similarity of any kind.35
Luther also shows that the breaking of bread is a common action when bread is
eaten and lacks symbolical significance. Thus all speculation about the breaking
of the bread was once and for all disposed of within Lutheranism. By the way, it
not only lacks foundation in Scripture, but also support in the ancient church.36

Luther naturally concedes that there are cases of a symbolical use of
language in the Bible. Vine means, in accordance with a common, simple,
linguistic usage, a certain kind of plant; but in symbolic usage (tropus)
it means something else. "I am the vine," thus means that the usual
word, vine, is given a higher dignity and means a spiritual vine, Christ the
life-giver. In the expression "The seed is the Word of God," it is
shown that seed in the parable was used as a new word, designating spiritual
seed, the Gospel which bears fruit. In all such cases the usual word receives a
higher dignity: the tropus word does not, of course, point back to the
old word. Reformed symbolism would, however, create the strange situation that
the concept "my body" in the words of institution would get the
meaning sign for my body, i.e., it would be given a lower dignity and point back
to a reality which was more full. This goes entirely against Scripture's form of
symbol words.37 However, all such
reasoning is and remains completely superfluous. No one can prove that the
Sacrament is symbolic and that the words should be taken in any other sense than
in their usual, everyday, literal meaning.

Every closer study of the symbolic interpretation of the Reformed shows that
what faces us is a flight from facts. The different exegetical details in their
interpretations are derived from easily accessible, general principles taken
from the legacy of spiritualism which, like a shadow, has followed Christianity
throughout history. Faced with the Biblical fact that the body and blood of the
Creator, sacrificed and smitten, rest on the Christian altar, there arises in
every age a spontaneous protest, formulated by Zwingli: The soul eats
"spirit and therefore it does not eat meat."38
A modern Reformed scholar has commented on Zwingli's words apologetically: This
is not flat rationalism, but rather a testimony of how the Spirit is tied to God
(Gottesverbundenheit des Geistes).39
Perhaps one could agree, but then it must be stressed that it is not a matter of
flat rationalism in the sense of atheism. However, what does occur in Zwingli is
a pious rationalism which, in Luther's eyes, is a greater enemy of the Biblical
truth than heathen rationalism, which must admit the unambiguity of the words of
institution.

Faced with the sentence "The Sacrament is the true body of Christ,"
one may indeed ask what is meant by an intensification like the word
"true." If we speak of the body of Christ, we cannot reasonably be
speaking of any other body than the one that was born of Mary, nailed to the
cross and arisen from the grave. This is "true," and it ought to be
impossible to mean anything else. But just as the word presence must be defined
as real presence, and just as in the Nicene Creed, Christ must be referred to as
true God, so Christian experience with the work of error makes it necessary to
speak of Christ's "true" body. For centuries speculative minds have
found ways to empty words of their meanings. From the very beginning the church
was surrounded by a heathen philosophy, Platonism, which divides existence into
two levels: the sphere of visible things and that of their real kernel, the
idea, a shadow world behind things. (The Platonists themselves were of the
opinion that the physical world was a shadow world in relation to the
non-sensuous existence.) In the teaching on the Sacrament of the Altar which is
called Augustinian after the church father, St. Augustine, it is, following the
thinking described above, a question of a presence of the idea of the
body of Christ, which has an almost independent reality in relation to the
physical body of Christ in heaven. The medieval church sometimes used the
concept substance in the same sense. Especially within the school based on
Thomas Aquinas, this concept was used to designate the invisible something of
things, a something which is the essence but which has no extension, is not
visible and cannot be weighed. The body of Christ which is present in the
Sacrament of the Altar becomes the substance of the body of Christ. The
difficulty of thought involved in the notion that the whole body of Christ could
be contained in its entirety, not only in the little host, but also in a most
minute particle of it, is thus easily solved but at the price of the physical
concretion of the body of Christ. The substance is declared to be non-local; the
same substance is in all of the air in space just as it is in a little bit of
air. In like fashion the illocal and invisible substance of the body of Christ
can, of course, be contained anywhere. The doctrine of transubstantiation,
so-called--a concept which in itself allows for the most divergent
interpretations and is by no means unambiguous--means for Thomas that the
invisible substance of the visible bread, lacking existence in space, is
replaced by the equally invisible and illocal part of the body of Christ which
is called its substance. Since it is a question of spiritual realities outside
space, this change of substance does not in any way mean that the body of Christ
is tied to any place. The remaining external properties of the bread merely
convey a relation to space which is not precisely described: through the
mediation of alien dimensions.40 If,
then, those external properties of the bread should cease to exist, it would no
longer be possible to speak of a presence of the substance of the body of
Christ. The latter would not cease to exist on the altar or in any other place;
it would never have been there through a genuine existence of its own. It exists
as a substance entirely exempted from spatial conditions.

That this reasoning has disastrous consequences for the Real Presence is
evident from the following discussion in Thomas. It is important for the modern
reader to restrain his spontaneous judgment that the next example used is based
on superstition. It is through the position towards a certain occurrence within
medieval popular devotion, with all its deficiencies, that light will be thrown
upon questions far more serious than the one of the scripturalness of the
occurrence itself. It is commonly said that the heart of medieval devotion is
expressed in the belief in the so-called Mass of St. Gregory, the miracle in
which Jesus became visible in the host. According to tradition, this occurred
once when St. Gregory the Great celebrated mass. Similar occurrences were
mentioned as having happened in many quarters; sometimes the suffering Man of
Sorrows was seen, sometimes it was the newborn Babe. Confronted with such
accounts, Thomas had to deny their possibility: Jesus is not at all present in
the Sacrament in such a way that He could possibly be seen, even through a
miracle. If the bread has ceased to exist as the accounts propose to say, then
the body of Christ has lost the one and only mediate tie-up with space.
Furthermore, substances are accessible only to the intellect. If the veil of the
species of the Sacrament falls, the concealed Savior, whom faith yearns to
behold, is not unveiled. If the pious account is true, St. Thomas' system falls
instead, and this he must prevent. He looks for a way out of his dilemma in
various ways. In one case, he presumes that God has effected a certain
perception in the eyes of those who saw the miracle, i.e., an objective
hallucination. Thomas' major thought must not, in any case, be disturbed: that
the substances as such are not visible or accessible to any of the senses or to
the imagination, but only to the intellect, the object of which is "that
which is."41 For Thomas the reality
of the Sacrament exists only in the ideal world of thought.

In this way the body of Christ has evaporated through philosophical
speculation, and the accounts of popular faith about the revelation of the Man
of Sorrows could not even hypothetically be true. The Sacrament is no longer a
veil concealing the true body of Christ. It gives only the shadow images of the
wandering intellect, beyond all spheres of reality. In correspondence about
this, Hermann Sasse has penned the following words: "Yes, Thomas Aquinas
was a Semi-Calvinist. He anticipated the ideas of the Swiss reformers which in
time totally destroyed the Sacrament." Other quarters as well have come to
this insight in the debate now taking place, without voicing the complaint
expressed by Hermann Sasse and without the important reservation that Thomas'
faith was better than his doctrine, and that he who wrote the wonderful
sacramental hymn, Pange lingua, and the office of the Corpus Christi
feast--a feast which at that time had not yet been united with the introduction
of the extra-biblical sacramental procession--reached higher with his heart and
his devotion than he did with his mind and with his pen.

The world of medieval theology was not exclusively under Thomas' domination.
At the side of his school of thought, Thomism or realism, there was another
school called nominalism or Ockhamism, the name of which was derived from its
most outstanding representative, William of Ockham. Its fate today is that it is
described as the mother of un-churchly theology and the grandmother of the Age
of Enlightenment, the French Revolution and unbelief. The triumphal procession
of the Thomistic school within the later Roman Church has not only put the
heretic's hat on the factual views of its competitor. It has also inspired all
kinds of statements and slogans which do not, indeed, correctly reproduce the
viewpoint of nominalism. For example, it is often said that nominalism denied
that a natural knowledge of God (in accordance with Romans 1:17) or objective
knowledge at all was ever possible. Such statements are erroneous.42
Erroneous also are the cultural-historical considerations which regard
nominalism as the cancerous growth of European culture, the rescue of which
would be a return to a cultural synthesis of Thomistic coinage, which in fact
never existed. These romantic considerations can be sharpwitted in view of the
symptoms of sickness in our modern-day existence, but this does not vouch for
insights into the history of philosophy and culture. The only thing, however,
which has real importance in our context, is the fact that nominalism rejects
the substance concept that Thomas embraces. The divorce has ceased between the
kernel of things in its incomprehensibility and sublimity on the one hand, and
its factual concretion on the other. Even though transubstantiation is accepted
as an expression in obedience to the church, the body of Christ is present as a
genuine reality and with an existence of its own. The presence is indeed
miraculous, so that by the special intervention of God it cannot be beheld, and
so that the presence is the same in every particle of the host which can be
broken, without Christ's body being broken; but nevertheless, that which
appeared when the Man of sorrows appeared is precisely the Lord and gift of the
host who has come to us. The fact that the species of the bread has ceased to
exist means only that the concealing veil has fallen. Concerning this a modern
Thomist theologian has written critically, "As Ockham shows us, even
learned theology has on this point gone over the border into the sphere of
popular devotion."43 Nominalism
does, in fact, stand up for the concrete, popular devotion, for the
non-speculative, non-philosophical, Biblical concretion in matters concerning
the body of Christ in the Sacrament. This should not be construed to mean that
nominalism was inclined to a naive belief in miracles and had a tendency to
believe any and all accounts about bleeding hosts and babes in swaddling clothes
on Altars. In this respect, representatives of this school were restrained and
insisted on the right to freely investigate the instances. Nominalism retained
the right to ascertain that all such accounts were in fact pure superstition.
Nonetheless, it affirmed in principle the possibility of such occurrences. The
miracle that all of the resurrected Christ is given in the slightest particle of
the host is not, in nominalism, valued because of some idea that the body of
Christ is deprived of its physical concretion. Jesus can appear as true man in
His Sacrament.

As far as the Lutheran teaching is concerned, it is important that Luther
confesses that he clearly takes his stand with the view of the nominalistic
school as to substances.44 This does not
mean that Luther is the prisoner of a philosophical system. Like nominalism, he
gave up on an insoluble problem. The ancient shadow of reality beyond reality is
gone. Thus Luther identifies himself with the preaching which has hitherto
occurred saying that the natural body of Christ in the Sacrament is as big,
wide, thick and long as it was when He was on the cross.45
"Thus they [the deniers of the Sacrament] say that it is unsuitable that
God should work so many miracles in the Sacrament which He does not do
elsewhere. For the fact that we believe that the one body of Christ is at one
hundred thousand places [at one time], that so many pieces of bread are broken,
and that the large bones are hidden there, that no one sees them or recognizes
them, all this they deem unsuitable, are much surprised and do not understand
that these are thoughts without benefit. For if anyone wishes to measure in that
way, nothing in creation will remain."46
(Here follow the parallels taken from the miracles of creation, such as the
miraculous fact of vision--typical for Luther. With a verve like that of
Chesterton, Luther shows how that which is natural is basically absurd and
incomprehensible.) These words about the full presence of the unlimited
corporality of Christ in the consecrated host was just too much for the
Philippistic editors--pupils of Philip Melanchthon--who edited the first edition
of Luther's works. Consequently, the words were simply omitted.

The use of this editing principle made it imperative to remove quite a number
of passages in Luthers works. (The gnesio-Lutheran--genuine Lutheran--edition of
his works, which appeared immediately afterwards as a countermove, naturally put
them back in again.) For Luther contends consistently that Christ remains an
external, bodily thing after His resurrection.47
In a way that was and still is a stumbling block for spiritualists, Luther
determines that the incarnate God remains man in all eternity and that Christ's
resurrection is not the act through which His humanity is removed or diluted in
any way. Luther sees a parallel between the resurrected Christ's passing through
the grave stone and His entering into the host. "When Christ's body passed
through the stone, His body remained as big and thick as it was before . . . .
That is just the way He is and Christ can be in the bread, too."48
With great sharpness, Luther rejects here the medieval, natural philosophical
speculation which counted light as a basic element of existence and thought that
light, darkened in the present era and bound to its effects, had by the
resurrection of Christ been restored to its original power, which included the
ability to penetrate bodies (subtilitas). The superiority of the body of
Christ in relation to material--in its passing through the stone and its coming
to the bread on the altar--was thereby established by means of diluting its
corporality, making it into something resembling fire. The stumbling block which
the miracle presents is thus removed: the resurrection and the Sacrament thus no
longer give the true body of Christ, but rather a flame of fire designated by
that appellation. "But they will not get away from me by their 'subtlety.'
It is still the same body of Christ, and the door is closed, too. And Christ did
not slip in between the cracks and the nail holes. He had flesh and bones, as He
Himself testifies in the last chapter of St. Luke."49
Neither at Easter nor in the Sacrament is Christ a spirit revelation or an
apparition of a spirit with a corporality like the protoplasma of the
Theosophists, an undefined fluid on the threshold between two existences.
"The body of Christ, be it as it may in spiritual or bodily essence,
visible or invisible, is real, natural flesh, which one can grasp, feel, see and
hear, born of a woman, dead on the cross."50
Even if the resurrection made Christ exempt from, e.g., the need for food, he
remains one who does not lack flesh and bones.51
Also when Christ is in the hearts of the believers, it is the man Jesus that
takes His dwelling in man's temple with unlimited corporality.52
When the Apostle speaks of a spiritual body in 1 Corinthians 15, this should by
no means be construed as meaning something opposed to flesh and blood, but as
something in contrast to that animal life which is subject to the law of
corruption.53 And when Luther in
extravagant words praises the body of Christ as a spiritual flesh--we shall deal
with this in detail in the last chapter of this book--it is, of course, the
bodily Christ that he is praising, because God's body exercises a spiritual
effect: "for it is a spiritual flesh and it is not changed, but it changes
and gives the Spirit to him who eats."54
Here we stand before Luther's absolute awareness of the significance of sticking
to the letter of Scripture and to the ordinary meaning of the words. The
stumbling block of the Real Presence must never be removed by making the body
and blood of Christ something other than the true body and blood of Christ.
Sabotage against the linguistic means of expression cannot be used to save us
from the hardness of biblical speech. Thus it remains a fact that Jesus'
glorification is not a defrocking of His human nature. This world is governed by
a God with a human face: in the center of existence there thrones a man with
body and limbs like ours. This God-Man effects the miracle that His body and
blood are contained in the lowly species of the Sacrament.

More than any other controversies, the Christological controversies
concerning the one person and two natures of Christ have, for the modern
observer, the stamp of dried flowers in a botanist's collection. Even when it is
supposed that they may have had significance for people of a past age whose
thinking had the prerequisites for them, they are explicitly said to lack
relevance for people in our day. Even a conservative sermon which intends to
have redemption as its focal point avoids everything smacking of dogmatic
Christology. The result of this is, however, mortally detrimental to faith in
all its functions. If redemption does not describe how One of the Holy and
Immortal Trinity suffers on the cross in the human nature He assumed, the
meditation on the person of Christ will inevitably become a nauseating hero
worship. The entire direction of Christian worship to the central person in the
New Testament will then assume traits of an unhealthy intimacy. The feeling of
anxiety, which seizes both believers and unbelievers faced with a Savior,
however forgiving, who is portrayed outside the orthodox rules of Christology,
can be said to be a righteous protest against heathenism in the sanctuary,
launched by both innate and Biblical monotheism. This holds true especially in
regard to the body and blood of Christ which rest upon the altar in the midst of
the congregation. If it is not a question of God's body and blood--belonging to
Him not as clothes but as parts of His eternal person--both Holy Communion and a
book like this one, which is devoted to the fact of the Real Presence, become
incomprehensible and obnoxious. The rejoicing kindled before the body and blood
of Christ in the Sacrament is possible only if the persons who adore know that
they are standing in front of the Power that created them, whom they cannot
refuse to worship without denying the sense of all human existence.

It is often presumed that the great denominations have a common Christology.
The disputes once waged and connected with the battle names from the coast of
Asia Minor--Nicea, Ephesus, Chalcedon--are presumed to have had lasting,
unambiguous results, preserved in unanimity by the denominations of today in
their confessions of faith. This uniform picture does not correspond to actual
facts. The Lutheran Church represents a Christology which is essentially
different from that of both Roman and Reformed theology. This means,
consequently, that the churches have different interpretations of the decisions
of the council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451. The decrees of that synod involved,
among other things, the relation between the divine and human natures of Christ
with the formula unconfusedly and indivisibly. This formula is often
heard in our day, but it is rarely perceived that there might be difficulties in
interpreting these words. However, even the presentation given in the
conventional works on the history of dogma ought to arouse the observant
reader's suspicion. These tell us that Patriarch Nestorius was wrongly condemned
by the Chalcedon synod: his teaching on the two natures is said to be actually
in agreement with the decisions which pronounced the New Testament condemnation
over him. On the other hand, we are told that Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, to
whom the council paid its homage, was in fact a heretic from the viewpoint of
the council's own teaching. The latter is supposed to have been guilty of
monophysitism, i.e., the peculiarity of the human nature would have been
swallowed up by Jesus divine nature so that in fact only one nature was to be
found in the God-man. Behind this accusation lies the following thought: Cyril
of Alexandria indubitably taught a real communication of the divine attributes
to the human nature of Jesus. For this reason, it is thought the two natures
cannot have existed unconfusedly. However, this axiom is not an axiom. As we
shall find, Lutheran Christology, which considers itself the heir of Cyril of
Alexandria and John of Damascus (highly revered also in the Eastern Church),
retains the integrity of the natures and nevertheless admits the communication
of the divine attributes to the created human nature of Jesus. Once one is able
to think this thought, the controversies leading to Chalcedon appear in more
comprehensible patterns.

The settlement which the Lutheran reformation worked out here and which sets
a boundary against both Roman Catholic and Reformed Christology means that the
banner of Cyrillian Christology is once again raised in the West. A false,
un-Biblical, Nestorian, schematic Christology is replaced by the faith in the
One Lord. The Christology which had become the leading tradition in Latin
Christendom had come to regard Christ's humanity as having the same relation to
His divinity as Christ's clothing had to the human nature. Only a form of
ownership, called in this case person, ties together, from the beginning,
the Son of the Virgin in the crib and the eternal Word. This leads to the notion
that, e.g., the miracles wrought by the man Jesus in principle were worked in
the same way as the miracles wrought by apostles and prophets: the power comes
from a divine assistance rendered from the outside. The man Jesus cannot be
worshipped either. The person of the God-Man has been deeply split. Nestorius,
the one officially condemned, had once again seized power.

From 1519 on, Luther proclaims an interpretation of Phil. 2:6ff. which
results in a decisive change. Now the old decision of the Synod of Ephesus was
again to resound splendidly: "If any one does not confess that the flesh of
the Lord is quickening, because it was made the Word's own, who quickens all
things, let him be anathema."55 Once
again, what Ambrose of Milan speaks of was to become a living reality: "the
flesh of Christ, which we today also adore in the mysteries [the Sacrament], and
which the apostles adored in the Lord Jesus, as we have said above."56
This big change was not caused by general speculation about the divine and the
human and their relationship to each other, nor by a religious need, but (like
the change in the question of justification) by a careful, exegetical study of a
Bible verse. We find here an interesting parallel to the Reformation discovery
of justification as far as the techniques of exegesis are concerned. In both
cases, Luther succeeds in freeing himself from the traditional, philosophical
interpretation of single words; righteousness in the one case, form
in the other. Around the latter word the revived Cyrillian Christology is
developed. Luther realizes that form of God in Phil. 2 ("being in the form
of God") does not refer to the divine nature as such, but to the divine
attributes in which Jesus' human nature rested, but which He did not fully
employ during His state of humiliation in order to make the work of redemption
possible.57 This means also that the
humanity of Christ is the iron which can be made to glow in the fire of the
Godhead unto freedom from suffering and death, the iron which lets divine power
be exercised by the human nature in miracles also during the time of
humiliation. This is the one, inseparable "I" speaking and acting in
the New Testament.

In 1526 Luther consciously and expressly draws the conclusion that the human
nature of Christ is like His divine nature, omnipresent.58
At this point we should mention that the usual term for this, ubiquity, does not
occur in Luther's writings. It is an invective used by later opponents of
Luther's teaching. It was normally rejected by Luther's followers as an
offensive word. For a variety of reasons, it seems reasonable not to use it
here. No matter what may be said about the terminology, what is important is to
determine what Luther means when he speaks of the omnipresence of the body of
Christ. This does not mean the last stage in a change in Christ's humanity
conditioned by the history of salvation so that His humanity, after the
materiality of earthly life, is replaced by the resurrection body of the forty
days, which in turn is surpassed by the deification of the ascension, whereafter
perhaps the day of judgment may reawaken the concrete conditions of earthly life
when He comes again visibly in the skies. For Luther the omnipresence of the
body of Christ means instead that the body of Christ took God's superworldly
relation to every point of creation already in the womb of Mary. Now Christ's
human nature is, from the womb on, higher and deeper in God and before God than
any angel.59 Yea, he says, Christ was in
heaven when He was still walking on earth.60
Luther explicitly rejects the idea that the ascension meant that omnipresence
ought to be ascribed to Christ because of that event: "For by His
glorification He did not become another person, but He is present everywhere as
He was before and always has been since."61
Behind the notion of two alternating forms of existence of the body of Christ
probably lies the idea that the omnipresence would imply a physical change of
the body of Christ, a peculiar diffusion of matter into an infinity, conceived
physically:

Here you will say: would Christ's humanity be extended and roll out like a
hide? . . . I answer: in accordance with your darkened mind which comprehends
the . . . bodily, comprehensible way, you will not understand this; neither do
the enthusiasts, who have no other thought than that the Godhead is
omnipresent in a bodily, comprehensible fashion as if God were a big, extended
thing extending all through creation.62

It is consequently the concrete, physical body of Christ, the same body as
before and after the ascension, that takes God's immediate relation to His
creation. Only a confused, unclear thinking operating with naive physical
categories has difficulties as concern the relation between Creator and the
created. In order to explain what is at issue, Luther adopts a quotation from
Augustine: "All things are in Him rather than that He is anywhere in
them,"63 and writes: "They [the
things] do not measure or encompass Him, but it is rather that He has them
present before Himself, measures them and encompasses them."64
In the child Jesus sleeping in Mary's lap rests all creation, and the galaxies
meet in a human being: "Him whom the world cannot comprehend, Mary found
upon her lap."65

This proves drastically the untenability of the axiom which lies behind the
modern interpretation of the Chalcedon creed. The deification of Jesus' body is
consistent with Jesus' full humanity. Cyrillian Christology does not indeed burn
up Jesus' human nature, at the latest, with His ascension into the fire of the
Godhead, diluting it into hovering smoke. Cyrillian, Lutheran Christology counts
on a normal humanity, which, while retaining its given created concretion,
assumes the role as the center of everything and the ruler of all, the object of
all adoration. All of creation flows into a genuine human being who really
suffers and dies on the cross, but what He dies is God's immortal death. Of this
Jesus Luther says: "For since Jesus is one with God, you must put this His
essence far, far outside of creation, as far outside as God is outside, but on
the other hand, so deeply within creation and as close to it as God is in His
creation."66

Thereby we have reached the stage in our presentation at which we must
explain in what way the insight described here constitutes a part of the
Lutheran teaching on the Sacrament of the Altar, and in what way it is not a
part thereof. First and foremost it must be stated that Lutheran Christology
lays claim to being Biblical dogma in the pregnant sense of the word. We are not
dealing with an extra-biblical speculation but with a central proposition of
Holy Scripture. At the same time it must be stated just as clearly that this
dogma has the character of a merely auxiliary construction as far as the
exposition of the doctrine of the Lords Supper is concerned. Its role in the
presentation of the meaning of the Sacrament of the Altar is entirely due to
historical factors. Here we must consider Luther's polemical situation. Zwingli,
his chief opponent, denied the very possibility that a body could exist at once
in many places. This denial was directed against the possibility of the
sacramental presence of the body and blood of Christ, since such presence
necessarily presupposes that the presence is equipped in such a miraculous way.
According to the doctrine of the Real Presence, the body of Christ is at one and
the same time present in its entirely in every single host on the altar as well
as in every part of each host. And masses are celebrated at the same time in
many different places. When Zwingli declares that this is impossible and that it
is incompatible with the natural existence of the body of Christ, Luther takes
it upon himself to prove that something similar does exist in another case. If
he succeeds with that proof, Zwingli's objection must fall to the ground. (For
Luther it is indeed true that the divine omnipotence cannot be limited, even if
there is no parallel. If he could not find a parallel, this would not be any
proof against the Real Presence and Zwingli would not win anyway.) Luther now
points to the omnipresence of the body of Christ; hence at one and the same time
Christ's body is present in different places. This condition contains the
possibility of sacramental presence at masses celebrated simultaneously: if the
one way is possible, so is the other.

This has led some people to draw a conclusion (entirely foreign to Luther)
that the sacramental presence coincides with the omnipresence. The delight with
which this identification has sometimes been accepted and taught, indubitably
conceals the desire to flee from the reality of the sacramental presence. All of
a sudden a way out seems to have been found, so that the denier of the Sacrament
can proclaim--apparently on entirely legitimate grounds and within a convincing
frame of orthodoxy--that the host on the altar is as much Christs body as the
egg on his breakfast table at home. Theologians devoted to the Real Presence
have in like manner felt compelled to express regret about the fact that Luther
stressed the omnipresence so much and that this threatened to empty the Real
Presence of its reality. In actual fact Luther renders exact accounts,
differentiating between different types of presence that ought not be confused.
The Latin terms and concepts which Luther borrows from medieval scholasticism
should not lead anyone to believe that Luther is operating here with artificial,
un-biblical ideas. The auxiliary service of the various terms employed is not
unlike the service rendered by words like "nature" and
"person" within Christology. These explanations by Luther were quite
naturally taken over by the Lutheran Confessions, where anyone can easily study
them.67 Luther reckons with at least
three types of presence of the one, unchanged, physical natural body of Christ.
The first type of presence is the way in which bodies ordinarily exist and it is
called circumscriptive. The second is termed diffinitive, and it
covers, e.g., the presence of the body of Christ in the bread of the Sacrament
of the Altar. We have already touched upon its peculiarity: it is a question of
a real presence in the consecrated, visible elements, but in such a way that the
whole is in every part (totum in parte) at the same time. These precise
concepts are not taken up at random. They take their point of departure from the
fact that Christ made the words "This is my body" valid for every
single recipient of the Sacrament: for everyone individually, undivided.68
If the circumscriptive manner of presence were to be applied to the
Sacrament, Christ would be divided up, crushed in pieces and devoured like other
food--this is exactly that of which the deniers of the Sacrament accuse the
adherents of the Real Presence. That is the reason why Luther spontaneously goes
back to the medieval teaching concerning the diffinitive form of
presence, and in doing so he speaks of the holy Church under the Papacy, which
sang the proud, splendid words penned by Thomas Aquinas in the mass of the Feast
of Corpus Christi: Sumit unus, sumunt millo, quantum iste, tantum ille nec
sumtus absumitur, ("whether one or thousands eat, All receive the
selfsame meat, Nor the less for others leave").69
In this form of the presence, a false, useless speculation does not speak, but
faith, receiving the miracle. The third form of presence is the omnipresence of
the body of Christ, called repletive, the celestial, unsearchable
presence. It cannot at all be comprehended or understood even by the angels,70
and can most certainly not be tasted by mouth and tongue in earthly matter. This
presence is infinitely more wonderful71.
Here it is not a question of Christ's presence in the things, but their presence
in Him. Luther determines that there is a unprecedented difference between the diffinitive
and the repletive modes of presence: "that the body of Christ has a
much higher and more supernatural essence when it is one person with God than it
had when it was in the sealed stone and the door...for the other way in which
the body of Christ was in the stone, all saints will also possess in
heaven."72 (The other way at the
Easter miracle--His going through the closed stone and the closed door--is, as
Luther always points out, the same as in the Sacrament of the Altar.) Touching
Christ's body with one's hands and mouth in His relation to creation is as
impossible as grasping the Godhead itself. Thus when Luther says, "There is
a difference between His [omni-]presence and your grasping [Him in the
Sacrament],"73 he is not, indeed,
operating with modern existentialistic interpretations, in which the subjective
experience for me merely gives an immediate importance to something generally
given. Luther stood here on the foundation of the Biblical teaching concerning
the Creator's exaltedness and incomprehensibility, and at the same time on the
foundation of the Biblical teaching on how we in the Sacrament truly eat and
drink the body and blood of the Son of Man.

Consideration must be given to the fact that the definitions circumscriptive,
diffinitive, and repletive reckon with genuine, constitutive
differences. The omnipresence must absolutely not be understood as the spread
out hide, as circumscriptive infinity, thought physically. It is equally
impermissible to interpret the sacramental presence as circumscriptive
presence, since communion would then break the body of Christ in pieces. These
two essential differences between repletive-circumscriptive and diffinitive-circumscriptive
correspond to the difference between repletive and diffinitive.
Contending that the presence is actually always the same, and thus putting
together what revelation has put asunder, is a false schematism that wants to
explain the incomprehensible using a single formula, and that is unwilling to
let the ways of God be manifold.

The current discussion about the content of the Lord's Supper has usually
centered on the word "is" in "This is my body." The
Lutheran "is"--in Latin est--has thus become an established
concept. Nowadays we hardly even encounter any debate concerning the
"This", despite the fact that at this very point we find one of
Luther's most important contributions to the right understanding of the
Sacrament. In fact, it would be entirely appropriate to speak of the Lutheran
"this." Medieval scholasticism also posed the question as to what
"This" in Jesus' words, "This is my body", referred to. The
answer given was that "this" referred to Christ's body. Behind this
answer lies the requirement of school philosophy in those days that
"is" must really mean "is" and that subject and predicate
must really be identical. Jesus' words at the first celebration must thus mean:
My body is my body. Luther goes against all exegesis of this philosophical type.
Luther lets the text speak, and according to the text Jesus took visible bread
in His hands and let the word "This" refer to that very bread:
"[I] stick simply to His words and firmly believe that Christ's body is not
only in the bread, but that the bread is the body of Christ."74
In a decisive point, this surpasses scholastic theology. It is no longer a
matter of tying a presence of Christ to the host in one way or another, or of
expressing a presence of one thing in another. Instead, Luther says that the
earthly bread in the hands of Jesus and in the hands of the celebrant is
the body of Christ; and he cites a parallel that was shocking in his day: This
man is God. Just as the man Jesus is God, the bread is the body of Christ. This
seems to be close to a deification of the bread. On top of this, Luther employs
the illustration of glowing iron, the old illustration which was used to express
how Jesus' humanity participates in the power of the Godhead.

The scandal this gave rise to was great. The adherents of the doctrine of
transubstantiation had let the bread be destroyed in obedience to scholastic
logic in order that Jesus' words, "My body is my body", might be true.
In doing so, one had avoided putting the created bread into any kind of relation
to Christ's holy body. The opposition which the Roman theologians directed
against Luther is thus not by any means the kind of opposition the modern
Christian, inspired by Protestant-Reformed thinking, would like to imagine. No
one accuses Luther of wanting to make the Sacrament vanish in a spiritual
direction when he denied transubstantiation and said that bread remained. On the
contrary, Luther is accused of an inadmissible materialization of the divine: he
mixed earthly and divine with each other.75
His Reformed adversaries chime in and, from their point of view, find that
Rome's teaching is more tolerable than Luther's.76
Yea, if the Swiss reformers are to be called Sacrament enthusiasts because they
do not confess that the bread is the body of Christ, all of the Papists must be
called Sacrament enthusiasts too.77

It cannot be said, however, that the Lutheran doctrine of the Sacrament of
the Altar elevates the created bread to the throne of the Holy Trinity and gives
the piece of bread baked by human hands the position given to the fruit of the
womb of Mary at the incarnation. The accusations against Luther from the left
and from the right are thus far unfair. What he wants to say is rather that
Christology inter alia offers such a union between two things that one is
spoken of by the other. "This man has created the stars," can be said
of Jesus, although His human nature was not created at the time. The personal
union between godhead and human nature nevertheless makes this statement
possible. This unity of person has, of course, not arisen between Jesus'
humanity and the host, but we nevertheless have the same kind of statement:
"This baked bread is the saving body of Christ." This type of
statement is to be found elsewhere as well. The Holy Ghost became visible at the
Baptism in the Jordan according to the testimony of Scripture: Upon whom thou
shalt see the Spirit descending and remaining on him, the same is he which
baptizeth with the Holy Ghost (John 1:33). Now it is true that the Third Person
of the Holy Trinity is not visible and is not a bird; nevertheless it is true
that such a unity did arise that the dove is rightly referred to as the Holy
Ghost: "Therefore, it is under all circumstances rightly spoken, when one
points to the bread and says: 'This is the body of Christ, and he who sees the
bread sees the body of Christ,' just as John says that he saw the Holy Ghost
when he saw the dove."78 The same
relation exists, e.g., in the biblical apparitions of angels. The angels are
invisible, incorporeal beings, but they appear to us in the form of young men,
and this form of apparition is without further ado called angels.79
In everyday life the same mode of expression is used when we say of glowing iron
that it is burning fire or of a purse, This is a hundred guilders.80
All of these parallels mean that although two intact materials are at hand, they
have nevertheless de facto been melted into a unity, so that the one is
spoken of as the other. The purse is no longer ordinary leather, it is
gold-leather: "the glow of the gold, which cannot be seen, has been
transmitted to the visible container, which in the eyes of the person regarding
it has become the concretion of the desirable gold. Thus it holds true of the
Sacrament that the host is no longer ordinary bread like bread in the oven, but
flesh-bread or body-bread; it is a bread which has become one sacramental being
or thing with the body of Christ."81
It is indeed true that the bread is something baked, round and thin; that the
body of Christ is a human body, born of the Virgin, formed humanly in every
respect, is also true. In the Sacrament, however, both become one single thing.
The round, white host is the object of everyone's looking and attention, when
Jesus proclaims it His holy body. This body is revealed not only in the bread,
but also by the bread: he who sees the bread sees the body of Christ.82
No matter how true the physical observation of the unchanged element may be, a
condition of unification has occurred and this causes the congregation to see in
the chalice no longer ordinary wine like that in the cellar, but blood-wine.83

To this a comment must be added concerning the expression in, with and
under,often used as a typical expression for the Lutheran concept of the Real
Presence: The body of Christ is present in, with and under the bread. We find
this expression only one single time in Luther's writings, and there it is used
to show that this wording could in a pinch be cited as a way of denying the Real
Presence.84 Compared with "This
is" or "The bread is", this wording lacks precision. When the
Lutheran Confessions use the wording in an affirmative sense, this is
nevertheless not a falling away from Luther's doctrine on the Sacrament. It is
stated clearly that this wording is secondary and dependent upon certain
conditions:

In addition to the words of Christ and of St. Paul (the bread in the Lord's
Supper 'is the body of Christ' or 'the communion of the blood of Christ') we
at times also use the formulas 'under the bread, with the bread,
in the bread. We do this to reject the papistic transubstantiation and
to indicate the sacramental union between the untransformed substance of the
bread and the body of Christ.

Thereby they wished to indicate that, even though they also use these different
formulas, "in the bread, under the bread, with the bread", they still
accept the words of Christ in their strict sense and as they read . . . . In
both his Great Confession and especially his Last Confession
Concerning the Communion, Dr. Luther defended with great zeal and
earnestness the formula which Christ employed in the Last Supper."85
Thus, for the Confessions, "in, with and under" is only auxiliary to
the proposition that the unchanged bread is the body of Christ, and that the
sacramental union thus has taken place so that two unchanged elements have
become one. The Confessions cannot thus be said to be guilty of a flight from
the hardness of Christ's words. Soon enough, however, even within the Lutheran
camp, "the bread is the body of Christ" was felt to be too obtrusive.
Melanchthon could stand it only of sheer necessity. Here, as in many other
points, his views soon became predominant, and the late Orthodox Lutheran
theologian David Hollazius, at the end of the seventeenth century, could without
hesitation write that this paradox of Luther's was not Biblical.86
The popularity enjoyed today by the expression "in, with and under"
must to a considerable degree be considered part of the spiritualization to
which the Real Presence has been subjected. Behind this often shimmers also the
inability to defend the doctrine of the Real Presence on biblical grounds: one
embraces it because the church has always taught the Real Presence, because it
is Lutheran or for similar reasons. This is the reason why one likes to stick to
wordings that have catechetical value ("the presence of Jesus,"
"the Real Presence," etc.), but do not in any way enter upon the
exegetical foundations of the Sacrament.

The background furnished here is a necessary prerequisite for discussion of
Luther's attitude towards transubstantiation. As shown above, Luther had to
reject transubstantiation because of the unambiguous report of the Bible that
Jesus, according to the evangelists and St. Paul, took bread in His hands and
called that very bread His body. Nevertheless, Luther's judgment on
transubstantiation is very mild: "However, the error [i.e.
transubstantiation] is very unimportant as long as the body and blood of Christ
and the Word are left intact."87
"It does not mean much to me, for as I have often declared openly, I do not
wish to fight about it; if the wine remains or not, for me it is enough that the
blood of Christ is present; may whatever God wills happen to the wine. And
rather than to have mere wine with the enthusiasts I would stick to mere blood
with the Papists."88 Also late in
his lifetime, Luther makes use of generous statements like these,89
and what they mean is that transubstantiation is, in his eyes, a pretty
indifferent matter, and it may be embraced by anyone who wishes to do so. Even
if it is true that this cannot be the final thing that can be said of Luther's
attitude towards transubstantiation, what can be said with certainty is that the
energetic hatred against the doctrine of transubstantiation which is flourishing
wildly within the churches that have descended from the Lutheran reformation is
the testimony of a kind of belief in the Sacrament which is basically different
from that of Luther. The cheap fear of transubstantiation fears too much an
excess of presence, an excess of powerful words of consecration, an excess of
genuflections and worship of a heaven which has come to earth. To such fearful
guardians of a spiritual Sacrament Luther would have called out mockingly that
he believed something worse than transubstantiation, indeed that what he
believed in was sevenfold transubstantiation.

At the same time, Luther's writings do contain sharp words against
transubstantiation. These words are, however, not an expression of the mature
Luther's better insight in comparison to the uncertainty of Luther as a young
man. Neither are they occasional results of fits of temper in comparison with
calmer evaluations. What is at issue is instead those cases when the change of
substance is defended with dangerous arguments, such as when King Henry VIII
proclaims the theory that Scripture can be ambiguous so that bread need not be
taken literally and that God could not be united with His unworthy creation.
Against such things Luther does not spare words; the doctrine of
transubstantiation defended in that way is impious and blasphemous.90
That is the way he puts it in writings of an early date. Shortly before his
death, Luther again brings a similarly harsh judgment. It occurs in a passage in
which he at the same time with great earnestness insists on the adoration of the
Sacrament, and this proves that the Luther confronting us is not a Luther who
had abandoned his concrete faith in the Sacrament. Luther says here that
everything that is taught without the Word is an un-Christian lie. Without the
Word there is no faith, and without faith, everything is sin. For this reason
transubstantiation, even in the form of a pious sentence in the mouth of learned
theologians, is lying and impiousness.91
Thus these words strike conscious speculation, both the canonized error and the
private opinion nourished by the individual theologian. But they do not strike
the simple lay faith in transubstantiation; this sort of faith is the one which
enjoys Luther's tolerance as described above. Luther appeals to the simple faith
of the medieval parishioners in the miracle of the mass, and he rejoices without
restraint over the simplicity of this faith, which could not understand more of
the learned distinctions than what is seen is bread and what is not seen is the
adorable Christ reposing under the species of bread.92
Unconcerned about useless subtleties, the medieval congregation assembled at
church believed in transubstantiation, worshipped Jesus in the host and thus
embraced the same faith in the Real Presence as Luther possessed. That which
conveyed to the simple people the real content of Christ's words is not
subjected to the criticism which Luther voices on a higher level in accordance
with what dogmatic assertion demands. This observation is corroborated by the
overlooked fact that Luther never attacks transubstantiation in his sermons,
which are otherwise so rich in dogmatic assertions.

The problem treated here, Luther's relation to the doctrine of
transubstantiation, should not be confused with another problem which concerns
pure terminology, namely the use of the word "change." Luther himself
used this expression and other similar wordings as a technical term for the fact
that in the mass bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ.93
This does not involve a belief in any change of substance. A similar choice of
words occurs in the Lutheran Confessions94
and the Lutheran theologians of the generation following Luther did not feel
compelled not to speak of a change, particularly in view of the fact that the
concept was at home in Christian theology long before anyone conceived of
transubstantiation. Just as a blue thing can be changed into a red thing, while
the thing remains, bread can be said to be changed into the body of Christ
without the bread ceasing to exist. Above all, the old theologians have no
feeling of fear that they might be saying something too great. Only the greatest
words suit God. For this reason, Martin Chemnitz, the leading man in the
completion of the Lutheran Confessions (often called the second Martin because
of his role as the spiritual heir of the Reformer) says of the miracle of the
mass that it is "a great, miraculous and veritably divine change" (Haec
certe magna, miraculosa, et vere divina est mutatio).95

85 Tappert, 575 (SD VII, 35-40).
Tappert's editon has been changed here to conform to the original and to the
sense of the text. Tappert gives as the words of Christ "true body of
Christ" and as the words of St. Paul "a participation in the body of
Christ." Luther and the Confessions did not put "true" into the
mouth of Christ, nor did they interpret St. Paul's words as "a
participation in" but "communion of." Cf. WA 26:490 (LW
37:353, 356), where Luther says that the word "communion is the common good
which many share."

To the modern Protestant, a special characteristic of the Roman priesthood
and of the Roman mass is the power-laden act consisting of the reading of the
words of institution, called the consecration. That which happens in the
flickering light of candles and at the sound of a ringing bell is the sum of
what constitutes the attractive and repulsive traits of Catholicism: the claim
of divine power, extended also to material things and put into the hands of a
consecrated priesthood. Already at the discussions at Marburg Castle, Zwingli,
the self-elected representative of spiritual religion, threw in Luther's face
the accusation that the doctrine of Lutheranism was a re-introduction of the
papacy in this particular point, meaning that the whispering of the priest
conjured God. This accusation has never been silenced, and much of the
perturbation that has been awakened around the high church movement that has
come about in various Protestant quarters, is an echo of Zwingli's protest.

Here, just as with regard to transubstantiation, it must, however, be said
that Luther and his Lutheran followers go much further than the modern
Protestant fears and suspects. Here as well as in other points, medieval
theology was under pressure not to let the finite contain the infinite, and it
was compelled to operate with limitations which made the reading of the words of
institution much less powerful than is usually presumed to have been the case.
The nominalistic school reckoned here, as well as elsewhere, with mere parallel
events: God works from heaven in accordance with an established covenant, when
the priest executes the sacramental blessing through the words of institution,
which in themselves are empty and without power. The Thomistic school thought
differently and wanted to acknowledge a power in the words of institution, but
this power is not the divine, uncreated power which effects the Real Presence
itself; it is merely a created power which functions as a subordinate tool for
the process that leads to the Presence of the Sacrament. This thought goes back
to the notion that Christ as a human being did not possess the power to
consecrate the Sacrament with His human words; His words, too, were of necessity
without divine power. Hence the ordinary priest cannot, of course, effect more
than the great High Priest in His human nature, which never exercises genuine
divine power.96

The same concept occurs in the Thomistic doctrine of Baptism which, it is
supposed, is effected instrumentally by such a subordinate, created power. In
his disputes concerning the medieval concept of sacraments, Luther bitingly
terms this power krefftlina, little power.97
Luther replaces it with the power beyond all powers: God the Holy Ghost Himself.
God is in the Word and He Himself works the miracle of new creation. This holds
equally true of the Sacrament of the Altar. The word spoken over the created
element conveys directly the uncreated, eternal power of God. A modern German
scholar has rightly said about this that, with regard to the relation between
the Holy Ghost and the element, Luther does not say less than, but rather
outdoes medieval theology.98 When Luther
reckons with a genuine, divine power in the words of institution for the
Sacrament of the Altar, he does not without further reflection adopt the
patterns of the Middle Ages, whose theology thus, to some extent, had a
construction different from Luther's.

For other reasons, too, it is not possible to presume--as is often done--that
Luther, in a routine fashion, simply took over his teaching on the effect of the
words of institution as a legacy from a dark, papistic past. When attacked by
Zwingli, Luther consciously and very emphatically defended the biblical teaching
on consecration. It can also be said that in our day the real controversy
concerning the Real Presence stands precisely at this point. It is only the
consecration that ties the body and blood of Christ to bread and wine; it is the
consecration that makes the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ. Without
a clear teaching on the consecration it is, indeed, still possible to say that
the communicants receive the body and blood of Christ and that the heavenly gift
is present. But the essential thing will be missing: the fact that Christ has
made bread and wine His holy body and His holy blood and commanded us to eat it.
A presence alongside bread and wine need not differ from the general presence of
Christ in His two natures (which includes his body and blood); this general
presence is promised for every service and is constantly being received by
faith. Only the consecration ties the presence to the elements and creates the
Real Presence in its specific sense. Only the conscious by-passing of the
stumbling-block of the consecration has made it possible to create the modern
union documents which wish to reconcile the Presence and the absence of the body
of Christ and which pretend to represent a higher unity between Lutheranism and
the denial of the Sacrament.99

For Luther, Christ Himself entrusted the consecration to the Church in Holy
Scripture.

If anyone were to say that Christ did not command us to pronounce these words
"This is my body" in the Lord's Supper, Answer: It is true that it
does not say in the text "You shall pronounce 'This is my body',"
neither is there any hand painted pointing to it [=no NB is printed in the
margin]. . . neither does it say in the text you shall pronounce "take
and eat." Neither does it say "You shall take bread and bless it,
etc." Let us see who would be so bold as to say that one should not take
bread nor bless it nor pronounce "Take and eat." Is it not enough
that He says at the end "This do in remembrance of me"? If we are to
do what He did, then we must verily take bread, bless it, break it and give it
and say "This is my body." For it is all included in the word of
command "Do this . . ." He said that we are to pronounce the words
"This is my body" in His person and name, at His command and
bidding.100

Thus, when the holy words are pronounced in the person of Christ, they are not
an empty phrase. In order to emphasize the wonderful power of the words, Luther
employs two concepts which he originally derived from Zwingli's angry attacks on
the consecration. Luther speaks of deed words and command words (Thettel-wort
and heissel-wort). A deed-word is a word that describes a deed of God and
does not call for action or repetition on our part, as if I were to say from
Gen. 1: "Let there be sun and moon," nothing would happen.101
Command-word is a word that requires of man an action: as "thou shalt have
no other gods." As regards the Lord's Supper, Luther now finds that in
themselves Jesus' words at the Last Supper, "This is my body," are to
be considered deed-words; they describe what Jesus did that first time:
"They are deed-words, which Christ speaks the first time, and He does not
lie when He says 'Take eat, this is my body, etc.,' just as sun and moon were
there when He said in Gen. 1: 'Let there be sun and moon.' Thus His word is no
powerless word but a word of power which creates what it says. Ps. 33[:9]: 'He
commanded and it was there.'"102
The first Lord's Supper thus contained a powerful, creative word with the same
power as the word that once called forth the heavenly bodies.

Through the command of Christ to Christians, "Do this," the
following condition now arises: Since the deed-words are now included in the
command-words, they are no longer mere deed words, but also command-words, for
everything happens which they command, by virtue of the divine command-words
through which they were spoken.103 The
powerful deed-word in time past at the first communion has, through the
command-word, "Do this" been entrusted to the Church in all times as
an ever-flowing source of the realization of the Real Presence. This is Luther's
doctrine of the consecration. The priest celebrating the Sacrament takes into
his mouth God's own creative word and in so doing works the miracle of the mass.
To this Luther adds that the other sacramental formulas (in Baptism and in
Absolution) would without the divine command remain empty formulas, but become,
through the divine institution which authorizes their repetition, powerful,
efficacious words: "yea, even if there were a command-word that I should
say to water 'this is wine,' you would see if it would not become wine."104
The Creator's right to have the disposal of His creation can in principle be
transmitted to human beings without limitations, and also the so-called natural
miracles lie in the extension of the thought of the power of consecration. In
all of this it holds true that human action would remain empty and
inefficacious, if God had not placed Himself behind the action:

Here, too, if I pronounced the words "This is my body" over all
bread, nothing would happen. But when we, in accordance with His institution
and command, say in the Lord's Supper, "This is my body," then it is
His body, not on account of our speaking or our mighty word, but because He
commanded us so to speak and to do and bound His command and His action to our
words.105

This reference to the fact that the Sacrament is celebrated in the power of the
first communion, which is contained in such expressions by Luther, must not be
understood in such a way that the words of institution uttered in the liturgy
were to be emptied of their power. Statements of this kind, which are also to be
found in the Lutheran Confessions,106
are merely an indication of the origin of the vein of water. Both in Luther and
in the Confessions there are parallels to the different orders of creation which
now function by virtue of the words spoken in Gen. 1; these parallels, which go
back to John Chrysostomos and John Damascene, are always based on the fact that,
for instance, our plowing and sowing effect grain only by virtue of Gen. 1, but
also on the fact that the field would of course not bear any fruit without the
action of the peasant: "In like manner it happens with the Sacrament, we
put together water and word, as He commands us, but this action of ours does not
effect Baptism, but the command and ordinance of Christ does."107
It should be observed that all of these parallels reckon with an inserted link
in between (rain and dew, plowing and sowing, the physical union in marriage) in
order that Gen. 1 may reveal its power in plant life, the harvest, in issue. The
divine institution is what has given our actions creative power. The relation
between the first communion and our Sacrament is similar: at the first communion
Jesus' creative word filled our present consecration with divine power.

Thus when in the Lutheran mass the priest utters the mighty, divine, creative
words, "This is my body," the possessive adjective "my"
refers to the fact that the consecrator is commissioned by Christ, is in His
person. If, however, the celebrant alters Christ's commission and gives it a
different meaning, he goes out of Christ's person and speaks only as a human
being. Such a consecration occurs then only in the name of the priest and has
become an empty action, without the decisive authorization behind it. Christ is
no longer heard in the words of institution. The mere possession of the
Christian pastoral office and the uttering of the words of institution thus do
not guarantee a valid consecration. This powerless reciting of the words of
institution on one's own takes place, according to the certain conviction of
Luther and the Lutheran Confessions, on the one hand in the Roman private mass,
at which the Sacrament is not distributed to any communicants; and on the other
hand in the Reformed communion service, where the Real Presence is denied. The
fact that the Roman private mass is excluded from the ceremonies that are
sacramentally valid is usually accepted as the given consequence of the
criticism launched by the Reformation. One should, however, be aware of the fact
that it is not primarily the omission of the communion that makes the Roman
private mass invalid. It is rather the false sense which the priest puts into
the words of institution through which he reinterprets and stamps out the clear
words "take and eat," that makes the consecration a purely human act.
In quite another way and disturbing to many is the rejection of all celebrations
of communion within the denominations to the left of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church. This hits also such churches which aim to be somewhat like the Lutheran
church, even by rejecting a brutal, superficial denial of the Real Presence but
still not confessing it as a clear and unambiguous doctrine. In this
devastation, which like a wind storm drove Jesus Christ from altars previously
His in many of the Western European countries, Luther saw but the beginning of
the continued razing which would strike baptism, the doctrine of original sin
and Christology. As a prophetic prediction, Luther's opinion about this has
proved true: the Reformed heresy became in history the point of entry for
Rationalism. Beyond this Luther discerned also the dissolution of worldly
government by the right of revolt; for he who cannot understand the Divine
Presence in the sacramental species can neither accept the fact that divine
power has been given to sinful human beings. Zwingli not only made fun of the
most holy Sacrament, he made fun of the titles of precedence of the German
princely houses as well; in neither case could he understand how God conceals
Himself in external things. In Luther's eyes the last stage of the development
is that naked atheism will be born of such a superficial attitude towards the
works of God.108

The rejection of the Reformed sacrament is especially clearly pronounced in
Luther's letter to the Christians in Frankfurt on the Main from the year 1533.
Here Luther turns against a church oriented towards a theology of mediation
which in its teaching was close to that of Martin Bucer, who in time was to
contribute towards the Anglican Church's taking a similar stand. The
congregation in Frankfurt made every effort to remain Lutheran in outward
conformity and used traditional wordings: "in the Sacrament the body which
Christ means is given." They thus avoid accounting for the content of the
biblical expressions and, in the event that a Lutheran guest should be misled to
partake of the communion of that church, he would be deceived and not receive
the true sacrament: "Now if a simple person hears this he believes that
they teach as we do and goes thereupon to the Sacrament and receives nothing but
bread and wine."109 This
fraudulent procedure presupposes a communion that is intact as far as the
externals are concerned: the words of institution are read, and bread and wine
are distributed. Nevertheless, the Holy Supper of the New Testament is
non-existent here. The words of institution are thus no guarantee, for by such
words as theirs the words of Christ are taken away.110
The right meaning is lacking.

In Luther's Large Confession on the Sacrament of the Altar he directly
raises the accusation that our enthusiasts do not consecrate.111
But at the same time, Luther reckons with the fact that the words of institution
are read at the bread breaking ceremonies of the enthusiasts. Ridiculing them he
says that they might just as well sing an ascension hymn (in order to express
more clearly the Real Absence). Hence what is lacking is not the words, but the
right meaning. At the end of the Large Confession, we find Luther's
spiritual will and testament with a short explanation of the main data of the
faith, and there it is said that the Sacrament is valid regardless of the
priest: "For it is not based on the faith or unbelief of human beings but
on God's word and institution. If only one does not undertake first to change
and misinterpret God's word and institution, as the present enemies of the
Sacrament do. These have indeed mere common bread and wine, for they have
neither God's word nor His institution but they have turned and changed these in
accordance with their own imagination."112
What is referred to is thus not an external, ritual happening which in some way
has been maimed, but the Reformed doctrine on the Sacrament which changes the
meaning of the words of Christ so that nothing remains of them but an empty
shell, the mere articulation. This demarcation in Luther's testament on the
question of the validity of the Sacrament has been taken into the Lutheran
Confessions.113 This rejection
involves, however, only such cases where the priest in his preaching denies or
at least does not clearly teach the Real Presence. On the other hand the priest
whose teaching is orthodox, but who is secretly Reformed in his heart, still
consecrates in the person of Christ, but as soon as he professes his error as to
the Sacrament, he cannot effect a Sacrament.114

Thus for Luther there does not exist any unarticulated, religious, Christian
Word in general. For him the Biblicism which in principle lets the word of the
Bible replace a dogmatic examination of the meaning of the words is an
expression of Satanic intellectual laziness. Confronted by wordings such as
"the body that Christ means"--real or symbolic, present or
absent--Luther writes: "Where there are such preachers, they do not need
the Scripture and studying any more, for they can say in all points: Dear
people, be now satisfied, believe what Christ means, that is enough. Who would
not want to be one of their disciples?"115
The flight from theoretical things is a flight into sin and dishonesty. We shall
never get beyond the theoretical problem as to what is meant, what is taught and
what is said. The Sacraments do not offer us another, allegedly deeper reality
than the tangibles of the doctrine and do not open the door into the mystic in
the sense of something which is not accounted for or articulated.

The biblical Sacrament of the Altar stands and falls with the consecration.
It is therefore entirely natural that Luther on an occasion when a priest
distributed an unconsecrated host at mass expressed his condemnation: "Let
him go to his Zwinglians."116 This
blasphemous procedure of daring to consider consecrated and unconsecrated hosts
to be the same thing, of course resulted in extensive church discipline
proceedings. Only after it was revealed that the erring country priest had acted
in confusion was the threat of expatriation turned into a milder sentence of a
short term in prison. That is how great the zeal of the Reformation times was
for the consecration which Jesus Christ entrusted to Christians to use and to
defend. Of course Luther also reckons with the necessity of using a new
consecration (nachkonsekration) if the consecrated elements are
insufficient and new elements must be taken in to the altar.117
It is by the retention of such things which outsiders must deem trivialities
that loyalty to Christian revelation is tested and proved.

99 By failing to mention the doctrine
of consecration as a biblical, revelatory truth, it was possible for Peter
Brunner, who is commonly counted among the defenders of the Real Presence, to be
united with the deniers of the Sacrament of the modernistic-Calvinistic kind,
who have produced the so-called Arnoldshainer Thesen, cf. Brunner's own words in
Die dogmatische und kirchliche Bedeutung des Ertrages des Abendmahlsgesprachs
i Lehrgesprach uber das heilige Abendmahl, hrsg. v. Gottfried Niemeier,
Munchen 1961, 110. Also the orthodox part of American Lutheranism often shows
the same deviation, concerning the meaning and importance of the consecration.

108WA 23:69.23ff. (LW
37:16), WA30i:220.4ff. ( Tappert, 444, [LC IV.60]). The origin of the
Reformed heresy is, however, the Roman modernism, in the way that Erasmus of
Rotterdam is at the same time inspiring Zwingli and atheism, WA Br6:2076,
WA TR 5:5670.

Perhaps this particular point may be considered especially unspiritual and
unworthy, so that the analysis of the compass of the Real Presence appears like
a playground for theologians with sticky fingers who push their way into areas
that ought to be too holy for speculative thought. This suspicion is not
necessarily unfounded, and this very fact makes it necessary to point out very
exactly the limitations that are set for our thoughts and words.

As late as the eleventh century it was said within Latin Christendom, in
connection with Christ's own words, that the content of the sacramental gift was
the body and blood of Christ, while the reception of the whole Christ was to be
the result of the communicants being incited by the Sacrament to strive after
the spiritual life which is Christ in His divinity and His humanity. This
reflects the old conviction that the Sacrament is best defined by Christ Himself
who said only: This is my body, This is my blood. The partaking of the whole
Christ is one of the promises which is also apart from the Sacrament and is
directed to faith: We shall come unto him and make our abode with him (John
14:23).

Medieval scholasticism, which reached its climax in the thirteenth century,
took this later reality into the theology of the Sacrament itself. Through
concomitance (in Latin, per concomitantiam) Christ's divinity is also in
the elements according to Thomas Aquinas, for His divinity and humanity can
never be separated. This proposition appears to be biblical and reasonable.
Nevertheless, within the Ockhamist school we find the beginnings of a denial of
this proposition. The background of this protest seems to be that it was feared
that such wording could be construed to mean that, just as Christ's body takes a
real place in the consecrated host, the omnipresent Godhead would be thought of
as inscribed in space. In Luther, who evidently follows up the Ockhamistic
argumentation here, this is worded very graphically: "Let the hairsplitters
and the faithless sophists search for such unsearchable things and conjure the
divinity into the sacrament."118
Hence nothing may be allowed to suggest the idea that the immovable, omnipresent
God is concentrated to a point of creation by virtue of the consecration. The
body of Christ can indeed have both of these relationships, omnipresence and a
particular presence in Palestine, presence in heaven and presence in the
Sacrament. However, the Godhead remains in eternity the one with whom is not
variableness, neither shadow of turning (James 1:17). This is not only the
insight of philosophers but also that of the Reformers and of all classical
Christian theology. That God became man, that He came down from heaven, etc.,
has of course never meant a change of such a kind that the divinity was
contracted to the point where Jesus' body was. What happened in the womb of Mary
at the moment of the annunciation is rather that the human soul and body of
Jesus were lifted up into the person of the Eternal Word and possessed in it
God's relation to creation. The divine nature is not changed; the new thing that
happens happens to the human nature. The concentration which occurs is that it
can be said of this human being alone that He is God. All of the great Christian
theologians have been in agreement about the fact that also prior to the
incarnation, the Godhead was present in the Virgin's womb as He is present
everywhere in all space; the Godhead did not have to go to Mary. "The
body...born of Mary" ("Gott sei gelobet," The Lutheran
Hymnal, 313) went instead into the Godhead.

This orthodox understanding of the meaning of the incarnation makes it
possible in principle to give the word concomitance a meaning that is
acceptable. Then concomitance would only mean that the miracle of the
incarnation is indissoluble and inerasable, that the body and blood of Christ in
the Sacrament rests in the Second Person of the Holy Trinity as also in
Palestine and in heaven. The divinity of Christ in its invariable omnipresence,
of course, draws nigh in the Sacrament in the same way as it could walk into a
Jewish home through the door of the house at the beginning of our calendar by
virtue of the personal union. This personal union means that just as Christ was
crucified when the body of Christ was nailed to the cross, it is in like manner
correct to teach that Christ rests upon the altar on which His body lies, yea,
that the Godhead is grasped by the hands of the celebrant when the body of God
is consecrated and distributed. Nevertheless, it is not a question of a divinity
which has been conjured into the Sacrament.

Most basically the problem with concomitance is that the formulation and
dogmatization of this teaching in the medieval church gave it the character of
saying more than the fundamental Christological dogma of the inseparable union
of the two natures. In order to render meaningful the doctrine accepted by the
church, human thought seemed to be directed to operate with categories which
threatened the exaltedness of the Godhead. Concomitance does not become
reasonable and acceptable until the insight is gained that this teaching is
unnecessary and meaningless. It is a well-known fact that this teaching was in
time used as a defense for the custom of distributing only the body of Christ to
the communicants at mass. The argumentation used by the Roman Church in order to
preserve this usage119 does not in
principle depart from the concomitance of the Godhead: here it is only a
question of the presence of the blood of Christ in the body of Christ, so that
the latter is thought to give the gifts of both species in one of them. For
Luther the essential thing here is that he rejects the notion that the clear
order of Scripture may be abrogated, even if this argumentation were correct:
Even if it were true that as much is included under one form as under both, yet
administration in one form is not the whole order and institution as it was
established and commanded by Christ.120
Luther's way of arguing here is directed against the idea that religious needs
are a norm for how the Church should read Scripture. Even if the communicant
were to receive the gifts of both species in one, it is still clear that he
would not have received the whole institution of Christ. This is the decisive
issue. The argument of the concomitance of the Godhead has here, too, a certain
parallel validity. For Lutherans, too, it is clear that the body and blood are
no longer separated as they were in death--just as little as divinity and
humanity were ever separated in Christ. The resurrected Christ took his life
back again. In order to counter the accusation of a dead, bloodless body of
Christ in the mass, the Lutheran Confessions write: "We are talking about
the presence of the living Christ, knowing that death no longer has dominion
over him(Romans 6:9)."121 This
does not, however, prevent the special sacramental presence (with its special
sacramental form of existence) from being extended only to hold true of what
Christ says the bread and the wine are respectively. This does not mean that the
Lamb is slaughtered again before the face of the Father in such a way that body
and blood are separated. The exalted Lamb freely exercises His freedom to let
His body alone be present under the bread and His blood alone be present under
the wine. Their union in the resurrected life in the face of the Father does not
form an obstacle to different elements being consecrated to convey them to the
Church here on earth. Luther says about this: "Who has commanded us to put
more into the Sacrament than what is given by the clear and plain words of
Christ? Who has made you certain that this conclusion [the concomitance] is
true? How do you know what God can do?"122

Nowadays the wording "the whole Christ" usually occurs in a frame
entirely different from that of medieval scholasticism. The formula "the
whole Christ" has a great attraction for modern theology, which would like
to dispense with the Real Presence. "The whole Christ" is the presence
of grace in the Word, given to faith, and the presence which is true of every
service: "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I
in the midst of them." Since the words of institution are a part of the
preaching of the Word and are not only consecrating, and since the distribution
is often accompanied by so-called words of distribution, it is always possible
to let the Word's conveyance of the general presence treacherously replace the
sacramental presence constituted by the fact that the bread and wine are the
body and blood of Christ. Already in Melanchthon's interpretation of the words
of institution, Bible words about the general presence started getting mixed in,
and the whole Christ was formulated as a rejection of the Lutheran wording, the
body and blood of Christ. This tradition, which lays claim to the exclusive
title of satisfying the needs of piety for a personal meeting with God, was
handed down by Melanchthon's followers, the old and new Philippists within the
Pietistic, Liberal tradition. For this reason it is not unimportant to decline
all turgid, pious talk about Christ and to bring all discussions about the
Sacrament back to Jesus words, "This is my body."

119 The fact that lay people today
can, in certain circumstances, receive the chalice in the Roman mass changes
nothing in the controversy which has existed between Lutheranism and Roman
Catholicism for centuries. The controversy has always been about the question of
whether the chalice has to be distributed at mass, not if it may be distributed.
Even during the sixteenth century the distribution of the chalice was admitted
in some places within the Church of Rome. It is typical of a superficial way of
looking at things to conclude from a liturgical similarity, which has appeared
now, that the doctrinal controversy has been settled.

Although Latin Christology as early as in the twelfth century generally
denied that the body of Christ was adorable, the sacramental adoration in the
mass nevertheless remained established during the Middle Ages. It was given a
threadbare theoretical motivation by the fact that the adoration could be said
to be directed to the Godhead that was present in the Sacrament by concomitance.
Not until the Lutheran Reformation returned to Cyrillian Christology did the
adoration of the Sacrament again receive its natural motivation. The human
nature of Christ participates in the attributes of the divine nature and
receives without any limitations joyous adoration from the congregation
celebrating mass. The scholastic wall of separation between the Creator and His
humanity has fallen. That Luther himself practiced, taught and defended the
adoration of the Sacrament is a fact that is almost unanimously confirmed by
research scholars; albeit the fact is often lamented. What is not known is the
fact that Lutheranism engaged in a controversy over this question up until the
time the Lutheran confessional writings were finally completed, and that the
feast of the victory of genuine Lutheranism over Philippism was celebrated in
one of the German principalities with prayers for the preservation of the
doctrine of justification and the doctrine of the adoration of the Sacrament.123
One of the co-authors of the Formula of Concord took his doctorate with a
disputation on, among other things, the adoration of the Sacrament, and this
disputation took place in the presence of another one of the co-authors of the Book
of Concord.124 Of course, this was
never meant as an attempt to conceal the nature of the Sacrament as a means of
grace, its attribute of being first and foremost a gift of God to man. However,
with this the role of the Sacrament had never been exhausted; rather, a spring
had been found which gave rise to praise and thanksgiving as well.

In a special book entitled Concerning the Adoration of the Sacrament,
Luther examined very carefully the adoration of the Sacrament. The adoration
may, according to Luther, be executed in an outward and an inward way. The
outward way consists of kneeling, genuflecting and bowing. Luther knows that
such conduct has its counterpart in the court ceremony in the presence of
princes and that it is thus not reserved exclusively for the King of Kings in
the Sacrament of the Altar. The inward adoration which must be added to make the
adoration Christian is a veneration or bowing of the heart, through which you
from the bottom of your heart confess and show that you are His obedient
creation. This inward adoration presupposes saving faith: the hearty trust and
the confidence of the true living faith.125
It can even be considered the highest work of faith towards God.126
In itself this worshipping of the Creator can also occur outside of the
Sacrament and without any special outward gestures. Man can be overwhelmed by
God anywhere.

This adoration of the Sacrament is designated by Luther as an adiaphoron that
can be practiced but need not be. This does not mean that Luther would in any
sense allow anyone to proclaim openly that the adoration is inadmissible. He who
believes what one ought to believe, as has been proven here, can indeed not deny
the body and blood of Christ his veneration without committing a sin.127
However since the time has not yet come when the Christians only task will be to
worship God, what is of immediate importance is that adoration occur when there
is time and opportunity.128 The
apostles, e.g., remained seated at the first celebration of the Lord's Supper,
forgetting both the adoration and the reverence.129
This is due to the fact that the words teach you to pay attention and to find
out why Christ is there and cause you to forget your own works and only wait for
His works.130 Just as when one hears
the Gospel, God's Word, to which belongs the highest honor, because God is
closer in it than Christ is in the bread and wine, yet one forgets to bow before
it and sits still and does not think about how one is to show it honor.131
This is the alternative to adoration: faith busy with the forgiveness of sins
that is contained in the body and blood of Christ and proclaimed in the words of
institution.

Luther then divides the communicants into four groups as regards the
adoration of the Sacrament. The first group acts as the apostles did at the
first celebration and clings to faith in the forgiveness of sins in accordance
with the words of institution, omitting the adoration: These are the most secure
and the best.132 The second group
consists of those who exercised in this faith advance to their own deeds and
adore Christ spiritually in the Sacrament, i.e., in the depths of their hearts
they bow before Him and acknowledge Him as their Lord who works everything in
them and outwardly they bend and bow and fall on their knees with their bodies
in order to prove their inward adoration.133
The third group consists of those who adore without any outward gestures. The
fourth group adores with gestures only, and that is hypocrisy. Luther showed how
this happens under the Papacy, where, since there is no enlightenment through
the Word to create faith, there is only an outward, human veneration, to the
disgrace of Christ.134 Summarizing,
Luther says,

Nevertheless you see that it is not without danger to adore this Sacrament
where the Word and faith are not urged, so that I would almost contend that it
would be better not to adore, as in the case of the apostles, as is customary
with us. Not that it might be wrong to adore, but in the former case the
danger is less than in the latter that nature will easily rely on its own
works and let God's works remain without consideration, and this the Sacrament
cannot tolerate. But what more shall I say? There must be Christians to use
the Sacrament to do the works of God. Where there are not any, it will be
wrong whether they adore or not.135

In other words, everything that is to occur requires true Christian faith, and
wherever there is none, everything will be awry. Hence adoration is really no
more risky than all other works; there is always a risk that these, too, may be
taken into the service of self-righteousness. What Luther almost thinks, is to
be taken as a warning against letting the Sacrament become a splendid liturgical
pageant that drowns its character as a means of grace. The historical
explanation is the Roman sacramental practice which was separated from the Word
and justification, profaning the Sacrament of the Church in the streets and
squares, to the entertainment of the ignorant masses, not even understanding in
the sanctuary what Christ's innermost intention in the Sacrament was.

It is by no means unimportant to underscore that Luther does not make
justification by faith into a narrow, regulative compulsory principle which
dictates what the communicant is allowed to do. Certainly Christ was not on
earth to be served but to serve, but He never rejected faith's spontaneous
adoration which came from the three kings at the cradle, the blind and many
others.136 Justification by faith and
the conveying of grace in the Sacrament are to qualify the Christian action in
the Sacrament through giving the gift of the Spirit, but they do not become a
pedantic pointing out of what a Christian may or may not do. If you rightly
practice faith in the first point, namely belief in the words, the adoration of
the Sacrament will easily follow by itself, and if it does not follow, this
would not be a sin.137 Here the freedom
of the Christian reigns.

However, it must be added that the very concept of faith itself as used by
Luther tends to include an element of adoration. Faith means a trust in the fact
that Christ has overcome guilt in His assumed human nature, faith is the right
adoration, my believing that His body and blood are present, given and shed for
me.138 In the face of the slaughtered
Lamb of God under the species of the Sacrament, the Christian stands overwhelmed
and puts his trust in that only which is the source of all salvation. This trust
which considers the body and blood of Christ to be the greatest gift of God is
in itself adoration, not because it gives rise to thanksgiving and adoration as
ensuing effects, but because it itself gives God His greatest homage: faith in
His forgivng omnipotence in the sacrifice of the new covenant.

Just a few months before his death, Luther still proclaims his spontaneous
and unrestrained confession to the adoration of the Sacrament: "In the
venerable Sacrament of the Altar, which one is to worship with all honor, the
natural body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ is veritably given and received,
both by the worthy and the unworthy."139
The words "is to" can hardly be intended to abrogate what was said
above concerning the communicants freedom to act in accordance with whatever his
devotion bids him to do. Luther's wording is, despite its pointedness, actually
completely self-evident. Also that faith, which devotes itself entirely to the
miracle of the forgiveness of sins in the sacrifice of Calvary which is
proffered, realizes that it is receiving the adorable Savior in the host and in
the wine and would not in any way wish to deny that all adoration, praise and
honor are due Jesus in His Sacrament. Particularly in view of the fact that this
adoration is attacked by those people who deny the miracle of the Presence, the
free ceremony spontaneously becomes a necessity, and professing the Real
Presence thus procures for itself the desirable profile through the words about
the adorable Sacrament, described in Latin by Luther's own pen as eucharistia
venerabilis & adorabilis.

Ever since the high Middle Ages, adoration had within Latin Christendom been
in a special sense combined with the elevation, the priests' lifting up, first,
the consecrated wafer, and then the consecrated chalice. For centuries a
powerful wave of prayers and thanksgivings have streamed forth to the
Eucharistic Savior thus elevated. Luther personally put himself in this
tradition without any misgivings, and the two princely brothers, the Princes of
Anhalt, who themselves worshiped the Sacrament, are witnesses to Luther's
behavior at mass: "We have seen Luther throw himself on the floor with
earnest and with reverence and worship Christ when the Sacrament was
elevated."140 In both of his
orders for the mass Luther retains the elevation. In the simpler form, the Deutsche
Messe, the elevation is carried out during the German Sanctus, which
is printed in The Lutheran Hymnal under the title "Isaiah Mighty
Seer, in Days of Old." In this majestic hymn, which closes with the words,
"The beams and lintels trembled at the cry, And clouds of smoke enwrapped
the throne on high," the conviction is expressed that the city church of
Wittenberg is the site of the same revelation of the Lord Sabbaoth as was the
temple of Jerusalem. "We retain the elevation for the sake of the Sanctus
of Isaiah, for this is well in accord with the elevation. For it praises in song
His sitting on the throne and His ruling."141

The abolition of the elevation in Wittenberg in 1542 is not Luther's doing.142
Of course, Luther had never considered the elevation a necessity--the rite was
at the time hardly 300 years old--and under certain premises he could both
accept and defend its abolition. Soon, however, there are testimonies to the
effect that Luther thought that the abolition of elevation had lessened the
authority of the Sacrament.143 Luther
himself writes: "And if the time perhaps comes someday which gives reason
to elevate [the Sacrament], it is free and without peril to elevate again."144
"If it comes to the point that the elevation becomes necessary again in
order to avoid heresy or other things, we shall establish it again."145
When the Lutheran Confessions speak of the freedom to re-establish certain
ceremonies which have been abolished146
it was, as should be noted, the intention of one of the co-authors, Nicolaus
Selneccer, that this refer precisely to the freedom to re-establish the
elevation in accordance with the words of Luther quoted above.147
The resistance which the elevation runs up against nowadays confirms very much
its necessity, and the fact that the time about which Luther and Selneccer spoke
has now come. The rejection of the elevated Sacrament generally proves to be a
flight from the Real Presence, the power of the consecration and the demands of
objective religion to remain independent from the pious human subject.

As was shown in the chapter on consecration (Chapter V), the spoken, divine
Word effects the presence: therewith it is also stated that no time can be
inserted between the uttering of the words and their fulfillment: "For as
soon as Christ says, 'This is my body,' His body is there through the word and
in the power of the Holy Ghost; if the word is not there, it is ordinary bread,
but if the word is added, the words effect that about which they speak."148
Considering the parallel drawn by Luther several times between the consecration
and the creative words in the first chapter of the Bible, we may very well say
that he leaves as little delay for the truth of the words of the Sacrament as he
would admit that the power of the words of creation would be made compatible
with waiting for millions of years for the completion of the work of creation.
In both cases we are confronted with the irresistible words, "He bid and it
stood there" (Psalm 33:9).

The reality which flows forth from God's creative words cannot lightly be
made to cease merely because the communicants have completed their communion. In
two extensive letters to Simon Wolferinus, Luther attacks that man's teaching
and practice according to which the presence ceased with the communion itself,
for which reason the priest could without reproach mix consecrated and
unconsecrated elements after mass. This error cast unhappy shadows over Luther's
old age, and Wolferinus is to be considered equivalent to a Zwinglian. Of course
Luther does not wish to claim here that the bread carried around in the Roman
sacramental procession or the bread reserved in the sacramental tabernacle was a
valid Sacrament, the true body of Christ. Such things are outside the
institution of Christ, which speaks of a meal. Within this meal, which is the
mass, the Sacrament is, however, a sacrament with all the consequences of this
fact. The meal of Christ lasts until all have received the Sacrament, drunk of
the chalice and eaten up the pieces of bread.149
What remains after the end of the communion (reliqua or reliquiae)
is therefore consecrated by Christ to be His holy body and blood and is to be
received carefully and with reverence by the priest or another person as
Sacrament. For Luther it is thus a dogmatic demand that in the mass everything
that has been consecrated is to be consumed. This abolished both the possibility
of the Roman abuse of carrying the host from the altar as a Sacrament and the
possibility of the Protestant abuse of treating the remaining elements as mere
bread and wine. These two Luther letters were quoted diligently by the following
generation of Gnesio-Lutherans. Evidently the Lutheran Confessions, too, refer
to these letters in the discussion about the extension of the Sacrament in time,
although the fact that the reference to the page number was omitted hence made
this reference somewhat unclear.150

We are also in possession of historical sources which show clearly that the
remaining elements were consumed in the Lutheran churches of those days so that
nothing was left over.151 Likewise we
know that in Electoral Saxony, Luther's own country, wine was used for rinsing
the chalice, i.e., unconsecrated wine was poured into the empty chalice in order
to remove every trace of the holy thing that had been contained therein.152
It may be assumed that the peculiarly Lutheran custom of the celebrants often
communing last was due to the concern for the consecrated elements. The priest
can then without its being noticed carry out the complete consumption, and he is
thus not dependent upon the last communicants who may have difficulty in judging
when they should render assistance in this way.153

As was already emphasized above, this teaching and this way of doing things
does not in any way mean that the Roman customs of the sacramental procession
and the tabernacle are rendered legitimate. On the contrary, they are now
rendered completely impossible. Every attempt to take the presence out of the
meal is in any event combined with uncertainty and doubt, and nothing that is
not absolutely certain is to be believed at all. Thus, if in the Lutheran mass
by an accident or, as was the case with Wolferinus, by an intentional,
dogmatically objectionable procedure, the elements are put outside the use (extra
usum), they lose their Biblical significance. What should be done with such
elements depends entirely on the judgment of the individual. Luther himself
suggested that they should be burned. On the basis of Luther's views on such
matters, one may say that such occurrences are so deeply disturbing for the
sincere faith in the mystery of the Sacrament of the Altar that they ought not
become known when and if they occur. Normal discharge of the pastoral office
does not ordinarily need to be confronted with any such problems. To consecrate
such a large quantity of wine that it cannot reasonably be consumed is a sign of
grave disorderliness and unwillingness to go to the trouble of finding out the
number of communicants, which for Luther is an almost necessary prerequisite for
the celebration of the mass, motivated already by the general church discipline
practiced in connection with communion. Letting the elements remain
undistributed the way Wolferinus did passes the borders of what is merely
disorderly and is given a worse appellation: "I believe that you are
operating with Zwinglis insanities."154

When Luther in this way draws borderlines between himself and what is outside
of the use, he is not drawing borderlines within the action commanded by Christ,
from the consecration to the distribution of the last particle and the last
drop. If, within the mass commanded by Christ, the chalice is accidentally
spilled, this misfortune has happened to the true blood of Christ; Luther speaks
of how such an accident, which is not necessarily due to any sin, is followed by
great fear and trembling in the good Christian.155
We are also informed as to how Luther actually acted. Such an accident occurred
at the distribution of communion in the town church at Wittenberg in the year
1542, when Luther and the officiating pastor and the deacon, with the greatest
reverence and in deep excitement, attempted to consume the poured out blood of
Christ from the floor of the sanctuary. The witness writes: "This accident
touched Doctor Martin's heart so profoundly that he sighed about it and said:
'Oh God, help!' His eyes were also full of tears."156
After mass Luther, following medieval precedent, had a chair, on which the
Sacrament had been spilled, planed off and the wood shavings burned together
with pieces of cloth that had likewise been involved. This story is told also by
the leading theologians of the Formula of Concord, who express their approval.157
They were capable of taking cognizance of and highly valuating the same fact
which Hermann Sasse has worded in our day, "Perhaps no Catholic ever had
such reverence for the miracle of the Real Presence as Luther did. No one could
think more highly of the consecration, no one could treat the consecrated
elements more reverently."158

If our present age feels that these thoughts and actions are foreign, this is
not due to a greater love towards God and His Sacrament or a better
understanding of the Word of God. Rather this is due to homemade ideas about
what is appropriate for God and due to a muddy hope that development also in
religious matters will lift man above the cover of the physical. People want to
leave the dark ages of religion behind them and elevate themselves to a higher
level with better conditions, not weighed down by orders of creation, which can
be detected in the functions of the human body, freed from the ballast of
historical and geographical data given in Biblical history, relieved of
dogmatical propositions about a God who is carried on a silver paten. Such a
flight into the heavens has, however, always ended with a fall towards the abyss
with scorched wings. The rules for God's doings and for our table manners at His
altar are decided by God alone. This is one of the points where it is revealed
whether or not man can disregard all kinds of subjective practicalities,
including his need for salvation as the biblical filter, and instead meet God on
His conditions. We shall not get any theologians in the real sense of the word
until they have bent backs like the selfsame Luther, who had no qualms about
seeking God in even the lowliest things.

Also in this point of the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Altar there has
been a long history of resistance. It is no exaggeration to say that Melanchthon
and his followers, the Philippists, with dreadful malice attacked what we have
portrayed above. The strange thing is that the judgments they passed on their
opponents were simply accepted by later research. A presentation of history
tinted in this way gave rise to the myth about the peacefulness of Philippism
and the quarrelsomeness of Gnesio-Lutheranism. The real truth is that Philippism
always and consistently represents hateful arrogance in the same way the more
educated and enlightened person always thinks that he has the right to show such
arrogance in dealing with the uneducated, vulgar worshipper of idols.
Melanchthon directed this accusation literally against his Lutheran opponents.159
On the other hand, the Philippists were always the ones who were anxious about
church unity with the Gnesio-Lutherans, who were not willing to have such a form
of ecclesiastical co-existence.

The great controversy about consecration, adoration and the reliquiae
of the Sacrament was fought out seriously after Melanchthon's death. It spread
to many quarters: in Sweden, in East Prussian, and in the Hanseatic towns of
Northern Germany. In the city of Danzig, which was dominated by the Philippists,
the Lutherans, even on their death beds, refrained from taking communion from
ministers who did not teach that the leftovers had the character of being the
Sacrament or tolerated such a teaching among their colleagues. The matter was
not resolved when the Philippists offered to follow Lutheran practice without
accepting the Lutheran doctrine. Reverence could, the Philippists thought, be a
good reason for consuming the reliquiae, and they made reference to the
passover lamb in the Old Testament where such directives were given. This
reverence, which in modern terminology would be called almost high church, was
not sufficient in the eyes of struggling Lutheranism. What the Lutherans wanted
was not ceremony but teaching, not a church-political solution, but the unity of
the Spirit around the words of Christ.160

The teaching at issue here must be penetrated somewhat further. The
Philippists would not simply say that the presence was limited to the act of
receiving communion. This wording is probably a late innovation and belongs
rather to the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century. Instead, the Philippists
claimed that it is first the reception of the elements that legitimizes the
total action as being sacramental. Philippism reckoned with a Real Presence and
with the fact that Jesus had promised to give His body in the Lord's Supper,
even in, with and under bread and wine. On the other hand, Philippism did not
wish to concede that Jesus declared that the bread "is" His body (panem
esse corpus). That is why Philippism thought it was sufficient that Christ
fulfills His promise, that the communicants really receive the promised gift,
etc. Here lies the essential point, the status controversiae. For the
Lutherans, Christ had made the bread His body through the consecration and
commanded us to eat it; for the Philippists, Christ had promised to give His
body if one ate the bread. Not without reason, the Philippists drew from this
premise the conclusion that the Sacrament was an act, not a thing, and that if
the bread were not eaten, Christ would have no reason to fulfill His promise for
a non-existent communicant. In this case the words of Jesus have no direct
connection with the bread, the only role of which is to render it possible for
the promise to be fulfilled for the communicant. Logically this is an easily
comprehensible construction, which shies at the words, "This [bread] is my
body," finding this interpretation too literal,161
but which at the same time wishes to retain a church tradition that has decisive
values for devotional life. The Melanchthonian school's attempts to find a
solution have exercised an obvious attraction in all ages. In our own times,
too, we are presented with trickily written documents that speak of Jesus'
presence and Jesus' gift, but tell us nothing about what the consecrated
elements are and what Jesus said. What we least of all are told is that the body
and blood of Christ are, by virtue of the consecration, resting on the altar,
that they are adorable and that they must be consumed so that nothing is left
over. True faith in Jesus' words of institution cannot, given time to ponder,
hesitate about the answers to these questions. In an age when what is at issue
is (as it was at the time of the Formula of Concord was written) to unite
split and divided groups within Lutheranism in a genuine doctrinal unity, those
who are to be led together cannot be without agreement on this important point.
The common celebration of the Sacrament of the Altar which is yearned for must
occur with a common adoration of and with a common reverence for the holy things
that are entrusted to our hands

124 Andreas Musculus, Propositiones
de vera, reali et substantiali praesentia, Corporis & Sanguinis IESU Christi
in Sacramento Altaris, Francofordiae ad Oderam, 1573. Christofer Cornernus'
disputation took place under the presidency of Musculus, who can be regarded as
one of the warmest defenders of sacramental adoration and who edited prayer
books with the classical hymns for the adoration of the Sacrament.

149. WA Br 10:3894.27ff. For
a complete English translation of this correspondence see E. F. Peters. "Extra
Usum Nullum Sacramentum. The Origin and Meaning of the Axiom: 'Nothing Has
the Character of a Sacrament Outside of the Use' in Sixteenth-Century and
Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Theology." ThD. diss,. Concordia Seminary at
St. Louis, 1968, 201-15.

With the title, "The Sacrament Is A Means Of Grace," we come to a
subject that is much more extensive than those which have been dealt with in
previous chapters. If the various questions that are connected with the Real
Presence can be solved--and have to be solved--without recurrence to
justification by faith, it holds true that the Sacrament as a means of grace can
be touched upon only as a part of the central doctrine of salvation. We thus
stand before a task which is of far greater seriousness than any of the other
problems of sacramental theology. The term "means of grace" itself is
as such too unclear to be used without an exhaustive description. In the world
of religion there is much grace, and there are many means of grace which lack
biblical foundation. The almost automatic reference to the use of the Word and
the Sacraments often used in modern pastoral work sometimes involves a risk:
people do not know in what way they should be used. Faith in the Real Presence
alone is of no avail at this point. Heathenism is also familiar with the joy of
the great cultic festival around a deity that reveals itself. The modern
speculations about liturgy and sacrament, which have inspired the modern
liturgical renewal and in excess have changed the Christian houses of worship
and the traditional service, are mainly based on observations in the field of
the psychology of religion which hold equally true for heathen rites. Meeting
God and the collective feeling, expressed in the fellowship of a meal with
ritual forms, do not help in any deeper sense, not even if Christ is said to be
the center.

Thus it is not enough to take to heart the need of external action and
symbols. Sacramental religion will attract altogether too many people. In this
connection it is symptomatic that the leading woman minister in Sweden is
wholeheartedly involved in such a kind of highchurchmanship. With feminine tact
and intuition she has known how to take up useful little traits that are
constituting factors in the Catholic type of religion which has always sighed
with Goethe: The Protestants have too few Sacraments. Over a theology which
denies essential parts of the Christian revelation and proclaims a
Father-Mother-God, the red sanctuary lamp spreads its warm light, and communion
attendance is high and satisfactory. In the same way the gnostic cults could, at
the time when Christianity appeared on the scene in the Mediterranean world,
impress the masses with their numerous means of grace, splendid services and
beautifully apparelled priestesses. Here one might also call to mind that much
of the sacramental revival with the Protestant national churches of Europe goes
back to the Marburg theologian, Friedrich Heiler, who with great love and
diligence revived many of the traditional, beautiful forms of Lutheranism in
order to put them into the service of a syncretistic theology which not only
hovered above the confessions, but also above the religions of the world. For
him the means of grace were constitutive elements, but he found that the Jordan
of the Bible and the Ganges of the Hindus flowed from the same source.

The teaching of the Evangelical Lutheran Church concerning the means of grace
is not to be viewed as a part of such a concept of the means of grace. That is
prevented by the teaching of the Reformation concerning grace and the meaning of
grace. While there is a certain noticeable relation between the Lutheran
teaching of the Real Presence and medieval theology, and this finds expression,
among other things, in Luther's generous references to the holy church under the
papacy at this point, the Lutheran teaching on the means of grace cannot by any
means be viewed as an extension of scholasticism. For Luther it was necessary
here to make a decisive break in continuity. Even if Luther clearly reckoned
with the fact that the means of grace were at work in the many who were led to
salvation under the papacy, he feels nothing but distance from and enmity
towards the perversion of grace which prevailed in the medieval doctrine on the
means of grace. It would indeed be much better if the useless fear of
Catholicism, which goes to such wrong and unhealthy lengths in its attacks on
transubstantiation, were to demonstrate instead its Lutheran content by
emphasizing the error of Rome as to the means of grace. It is revealing to
observe that ignorance often reigns as to where the line of demarcation runs
here. Even churchly Protestants accept the general concept that the Reformation
loosened the ties between the external means of grace and the inward
forgiveness, and that faith means that the significance of the individual
replaces that of the priest and of the means of grace. This disfigures the most
essential difference between Rome and Lutheranism in such a way that the
opposing parties trade places. If it is at all possible to give a simple,
summarizing presentation of this question, it may be said that the Reformation--N.B.,
the Lutheran Reformation--invited to real forgiveness of sins in the means of
grace people who, during all the years of their life theretofore, had used the
means of grace in the conviction that they did not with certainty convey the
forgiveness of sins. That was the true nature of the monstrum incertitudinis
of medieval theology; the monster of spiritual uncertainty which bade, and still
bids today, that no one may apply to himself with full certainty the promise of
the Gospel in Word and Sacrament.

The Lutheran Reformation did not arise over a controversy concerning the
Lord's Supper. It was instead a controversy about absolution and indulgences
that caused the split in the Church of Rome. When the Lutheran Confessions
wanted to summarize the difference in faith that had arisen, they said:
"The bull of Leo X has condemned a very necessary doctrine that all
Christians should hold and believe, namely, we ought to trust that we have been
absolved, not because of our contrition, but because of the word of Christ,
whatever you bind, etc. (Matt. 16:19)."162
Here, in the bull which is in fact the Roman See's condemnation of the Lutheran
congregations as heretical, the abyss is opened which, according to the Lutheran
Confessions, separates faith and unbelief. Here it is proclaimed that the Roman
teaching puts the accent on human activity in confession, namely penitence,
while for the Lutherans all stress is put on faith in the institution of the
Sacrament by Christ's giving the power of the keys to the apostles. The same
bull condemns the Lutheran sentence that reception of the Sacrament is unworthy
if one relies on self-examination as to sins, on prayers and other preparations,
whereas those who trust that they receive grace there [in the Sacrament] do
receive grace.163

This Roman teaching which refers to preparation must consequently also teach
that, since no one knows his own disposition, all forgiveness of sins is
uncertain. This is the teaching which in Luther's opinion overturns the
foundation of the Christian faith. It extinguishes the faith that always applies
to itself with joy and certainty the Gospel in the means of grace. What Rome did
not understand--and still does not understand--is that "the Gospel (in all
its forms) is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the
Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God
revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by
faith" (Romans 1:16ff.) In the completed sacrifice, which the Gospel
proclaims, an eternal righteousness is once and for all achieved, and when the
Gospel draws nigh, be it in the Sacrament or in any other means of grace, it
requires faith and nothing but faith. This draws attention to the words which
the priest takes into his mouth and to the sacrifice which he has in his hands,
and dispenses with all thoughts about the efficacy of preparation, depth of
penitence and a good communion. The good communion, good confession, which
always lets the individual sway between hope and fear, is replaced by the
steadfast Word, and certain absolution, the overflowing sacrifice of atonement .164

The faith which is required for the use of the means of grace is thus trust
in the Gospel proclaimed in the words of institution when they call the whole
world to the righteousness which is valid for all. Faith is directed here to the
Word, just as the powerful Word directed to faith, creates, awakens and
preserves it. This does not mean that the body and blood of Christ have less
significance. The Gospel is never an empty declaration of the grace of God: it
is a proclamation of the realization of this grace in the obedience, suffering
and death of God. For this reason the Gospel exalts the body and blood of Christ
in the Sacrament as the greatest of all gifts. This treasure is conveyed and
communicated to us in no other way than through the words, "given and
poured out for you." Here you have both truths, that it is Christ's body
and blood and that these are yours as your treasure and gift. Christ's body can
never be an unfruitful, vain thing, impotent and useless. Yet, however great the
treasure may be in itself, it must be comprehended in the Word and offered to us
through the Word, otherwise we could never know of it or seek it.165

If the word thus conveys to faith the atoning and sanctifying power of the
body and blood of Christ, it is nonetheless a question of power which veritably
proceeds from the divine body of Christ. For the middle Ages this thought was
unfathomable.166 About this gift which
is extended by the hand of the priest and is interpreted to faith by the Word,
it is said: "This food changes him who eats it into itself and makes him
like itself, spiritual, living and eternal."167
Not to believe this, to believe that the body of Christ is not such a wonderful
thing, is to fall into the errors of gnostic heresy, to become a Marcionite and
a Manichaean.168 In the final analysis,
this power of the body of Christ is not limited to the soul, which in faith in
the Word is edified by what the mouth receives. Also the mouth, the throat and
the body169 will in time get to see
that the food received abolishes the fact of corruption: "the soul
understands well that the body must live eternally, because it takes unto itself
an eternal food which does not leave it in the grave."170
Such words are not eccentricities that occasionally find their way into Luther's
writings quite by accident. They are absolutely self-evident things, if the
Sacrament is really God's own body and God's own blood. Luther knows that his
teaching here is in agreement with the teaching of the fathers of the church
about the Sacrament as the "medicine of immortality,"171
and he does not back away from such powerful words which serve to encourage
faith and to give it something different from the swaying between hope and fear
which tradition bade during the Middle Ages. That is why the Reformation means
the great invitation to use the meal of the sacrifice of Calvary diligently:

We must never regard the Sacrament as a harmful thing which we should flee,
but as a pure, wholesome, soothing medicine which aids and quickens us in both
soul and body. For where the soul is healed, the body has benefited also. Why,
then, do we act as if the Sacrament were a poison which would kill us if we
ate of it?"172

Not to believe thus about the Sacrament, and nevertheless to take it in unbelief
and fear, would be real poison: "To such people nothing can be good or
wholesome, just as when a sick person willfully eats and drinks what is
forbidden him by the physician."173

If anyone would call this magic, he is best answered with the words used by
the faithful Gnesio-Lutheran, Erhard Sperber, when he was attacked by a
Philippist because of his and the Lutheran Church's teaching concerning the reliquiae
of the Sacrament: "For he [the Philippist] considered it conjuring or
magic; for what happens by God's command and by God's word is right and valid;
if one is to call this magic, it must be called holy, commanded magic (magia
sancta & iussa)174 White magic
is the magic which, from the time before the dawning of the ages, always
comforted creation in its distress and which prepares the new creation. It has
its source in God, who never asked us for counsel, who created us without our
participation and who saved us without our participation, and who wants to be
believed in as such a God in the Sacrament of the Altar.

This work is a condensed English version of Hardt's 1971 doctoral
dissertation, Venerabilis et Adorabilis Eucharistia (Eucharistic
Veneration and Adoration). Interested readers should watch for the complete
English translation, which is planned in the near future. No part of this
document is to be further published or disseminated by any means without the
express permission of Erling T. Teigen, 314 Pearl St., Mankato MN 56001 (e-mail:
74022.2447@Compuserve.com ).

the reverend doctor tom g. hardt was born in 1935 in Stockholm,
Sweden. He was a candidate of philosophy (=B.A.) at Uppsala in 1956, and in 1971
he defended his doctoral thesis. His bibliography includes nearly 400 entries
besides this dissertation. In 1961, together with some friends in the faith, he
formed St. Martin's Evangelical Lutheran Congregation in Stockholm, of which he
became pastor. At the time of his death this past summer (1998) he was still
pastor of this congregation.

Dr. Hardt found a mentor in the outstanding German theologian, Hermann Sasse.
The consequence of this was that he stood opposed to all tendencies toward
general protestantism, and saw not least in the Lutheran doctrine of the
sacraments with its realism, a truth which was not negotiable. Without
romanticizing, he placed a high value on a rich liturgical form growing out of
the faith in Christ's true presence in the Divine Service.